DBGAN: Dual Branch Generative Adversarial Network for Multi-modal MRI Translation

Existing Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) translation models rely on Generative Adversarial Networks, primarily employing simple convolutional neural networks. Unfortunately, these networks struggle to capture global representations and contextual relationships within MRI images. While the advent of Transformers enables capturing long-range feature dependencies, they often compromise the preservation of local feature details. To address these limitations and enhance both local and global representations, we introduce a novel Dual-Branch Generative Adversarial Network (DBGAN). In this framework, the Transformer branch comprises sparse attention blocks and dense self-attention blocks, allowing for a wider receptive field while simultaneously capturing local and global information. The CNN branch, built with integrated residual convolutional layers, enhances local modeling capabilities. Additionally, we propose a fusion module that cleverly integrates features extracted from both branches. Extensive experimentation on two public datasets and one clinical dataset validates significant performance improvements with DBGAN. On Brats2018, it achieves a 10%improvement in MAE, 3.2% in PSNR, and 4.8% in SSIM for image generation tasks compablack to RegGAN. Notably, the generated MRIs receive positive feedback from radiologists, underscoring the potential of our proposed method as a valuable tool in clinical settings.