TranSMS: Transformers for Super-Resolution Calibration in Magnetic Particle Imaging

Magnetic particle imaging (MPI) is a recent modality that offers exceptional contrast for magnetic nanoparticles (MNP) at high spatio-temporal resolution. A common procedure in MPI starts with a calibration scan to measure the system matrix (SM), which is then used to setup an inverse problem to reconstruct images of the particle distribution during subsequent scans. This calibration enables the reconstruction to sensitively account for various system imperfections. Yet time-consuming SM measurements have to be repeated under notable drifts or changes in system properties. Here, we introduce a novel deep learning approach for accelerated MPI calibration based on transformers for SM super-resolution (TranSMS). Low-resolution SM measurements are performed using large MNP samples for improved signal-to-noise ratio efficiency, and the high-resolution SM is super-resolved via a model-based deep network. TranSMS leverages a vision transformer module to capture contextual relationships in low-resolution input images, a dense convolutional module for localizing high-resolution image features, and a data-consistency module to ensure consistency to measurements. Demonstrations on simulated and experimental data indicate that TranSMS achieves significantly improved SM recovery and image reconstruction in MPI, while enabling acceleration up to 64-fold during two-dimensional calibration.