Image super-resolution by supervised adaption of patchwise self-similarity from high-resolution image

Abstract

Image super-resolution is of great interest in medical imaging field. However, different from natural images studied in computer vision field, the low-resolution (LR) medical imaging data is often a stack of high-resolution (HR) 2D slices with large slice thickness. Consequently, the goal of superresolution for medical imaging data is to reconstruct the missing slice(s) between any two consecutive slices. Since some modalities (e.g., T1-weighted MR image) are often acquired with high-resolution (HR) image, it is intuitive to harness the prior self-similarity information in the HR image for guiding the super-resolution of LR image (e.g., T2-weighted MR image). The conventional way is to find the profile of patchwise self-similarity in the HR image and then use it to reconstruct the missing information at the same location of LR image. However, the local morphological patterns could vary significantly across the LR and HR images, due to the use of different imaging protocols. Therefore, such direct (un-supervised) adaption of self-similarity profile from HR image is often not effective in revealing the actual information in the LR image. To this end, we propose to employ the existing image information in the LR image to supervise the estimation of self-similarity profile by requiring it not only being optimal in representing patches in the HR image, but also producing less reconstruction errors for the existing image information in the LR image. Moreover, to make the anatomical structures spatially consistent in the reconstructed image, we simultaneously estimate the self-similarity profiles for a stack of patches across consecutive slices by solving a group sparse patch representation problem. We have evaluated our proposed super-resolution method on both simulated brain MR images and real patient images with multiple sclerosis lesion, achieving promising results with more anatomical details and sharpness.