Unpaired MRI Super Resolution with Self-Supervised Contrastive Learning

High-resolution (HR) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is crucial for enhancing diagnostic accuracy in clinical settings. Nonetheless, the inherent limitation of MRI resolution restricts its widespread applicability. Deep learning-based image super-resolution (SR) methods exhibit promise in improving MRI resolution without additional cost. However, these methods frequently require a substantial number of HR MRI images for training, which can be challenging to acquire. In this paper, we propose an unpaired MRI SR approach that employs self-supervised contrastive learning to enhance SR performance with limited training data. Our approach leverages both authentic HR images and synthetically generated SR images to construct positive and negative sample pairs, thus facilitating the learning of discriminative features. Empirical results presented in this study underscore significant enhancements in the peak signal-to-noise ratio and structural similarity index, even when a paucity of HR images is available. These findings accentuate the potential of our approach in addressing the challenge of limited training data, thereby contributing to the advancement of high-resolution MRI in clinical applications.

Batch Implicit Neural Representation for MRI Parallel Reconstruction

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) always suffered from the problem of long acquisition time. MRI reconstruction is one solution to reduce scan time by skipping certain phase-encoding lines and then restoring high-quality images from undersampled measurements. Recently, implicit neural representation (INR) has emerged as a new deep learning method that represents an object as a continuous function of spatial coordinates, and this function is normally parameterized by a multilayer perceptron (MLP). In this paper, we propose a novel MRI reconstruction method based on INR, which represents the fully-sampled images as the function of pixel coordinates and prior feature vectors of undersampled images for overcoming the generalization problem of INR. Specifically, we introduce a scale-embedded encoder to produce scale-independent pixel-specific features from MR images with different undersampled scales and then concatenate with coordinates vectors to recover fully-sampled MR images via an MLP, thus achieving arbitrary scale reconstruction. The performance of the proposed method was assessed by experimenting on publicly available MRI datasets and compared with other reconstruction methods. Our quantitative evaluation demonstrates the superiority of the proposed method over alternative reconstruction methods.