Displacement-Guided Anisotropic 3D-MRI Super-Resolution With Warp Mechanism.

Abstract

Enhancing the resolution of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) through super-resolution (SR) reconstruction is crucial for boosting diagnostic precision. However, current SR methods primarily rely on single LR images or multi-contrast features, limiting detail restoration. Inspired by video frame interpolation, this work utilizes the spatiotemporal correlations between adjacent slices to reformulate the SR task of anisotropic 3D-MRI image into the generation of new high-resolution (HR) slices between adjacent 2D slices. The generated SR slices are subsequently combined with the HR adjacent slices to create a new HR 3D-MRI image. We propose a innovative network architecture termed DGWMSR, comprising a backbone network and a feature supplement module (FSM). The backbone's core innovations include the displacement former block (DFB) module, which independently extracts structural and displacement features, and the mask-displacement vector network (MDVNet) which combines with Warp mechanism to facilitate edge pixel detailing. The DFB integrates the inter-slice attention (ISA) mechanism into the Transformer, effectively minimizing the mutual interference between the two types of features and mitigating volume effects during reconstruction. Additionally, the FSM module combines self-attention with feed-forward neural network, which emphasizes critical details derived from the backbone architecture. Experimental results demonstrate the DGWMSR network outperforms current MRI SR methods on Kirby21, ANVIL-adult, and MSSEG datasets.