Deep robust residual network for super-resolution of 2D fetal brain MRI.

Journal: Scientific reports
Published Date:

Abstract

Spatial resolution is a key factor of quantitatively evaluating the quality of magnetic resonance imagery (MRI). Super-resolution (SR) approaches can improve its spatial resolution by reconstructing high-resolution (HR) images from low-resolution (LR) ones to meet clinical and scientific requirements. To increase the quality of brain MRI, we study a robust residual-learning SR network (RRLSRN) to generate a sharp HR brain image from an LR input. Due to the Charbonnier loss can handle outliers well, and Gradient Difference Loss (GDL) can sharpen an image, we combined the Charbonnier loss and GDL to improve the robustness of the model and enhance the texture information of SR results. Two MRI datasets of adult brain, Kirby 21 and NAMIC, were used to train and verify the effectiveness of our model. To further verify the generalizability and robustness of the proposed model, we collected eight clinical fetal brain MRI 2D data for evaluation. The experimental results have shown that the proposed deep residual-learning network achieved superior performance and high efficiency over other compared methods.

Authors

  • Liyao Song
    The school of information and communications engineering, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an, 710049, China.
  • Quan Wang
    Laboratory of Surgical Oncology, Peking University People's Hospital, Peking University, Beijing, China.
  • Ting Liu
    School of Public Health, Shanxi Medical University, Taiyuan 030000, China.
  • Haiwei Li
    Xi'an Institute of Optics and Precision Mechanics of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xi'an, 710049, China.
  • Jiancun Fan
    The school of information and communications engineering, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an, 710049, China. fanjc0114@gmail.com.
  • Jian Yang
    Drug Discovery and Development Research Group, College of Pharmacy and Nutrition, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK, Canada.
  • Bingliang Hu
    Xi'an Institute of Optics and Precision Mechanics of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xi'an, 710049, China. hbl@opt.ac.cn.