NeXtQSM - A complete deep learning pipeline for data-consistent quantitative susceptibility mapping trained with hybrid data

Deep learning based Quantitative Susceptibility Mapping (QSM) has shown great potential in recent years, outperforming traditional non-learning approaches in speed and accuracy. However, many of the current deep learning approaches are not data consistent, require in vivo training data or do not solve all steps of the QSM processing pipeline. Here we aim to overcome these limitations and developed a framework to solve the QSM processing steps jointly. We developed a new hybrid training data generation method that enables the end-to-end training for solving background field correction and dipole inversion in a data-consistent fashion using a variational network that combines the QSM model term and a learned regularizer. We demonstrate that NeXtQSM overcomes the limitations of previous model-agnostic deep learning methods and show that NeXtQSM offers a complete deep learning based pipeline for computing robust, fast and accurate quantitative susceptibility maps.