Accurate and lightweight MRI super-resolution via multi-scale bidirectional fusion attention network

High-resolution magnetic resonance (MR) imaging has attracted much attention due to its contribution to clinical diagnoses and treatment. However, because of the interference of noise and the limitation of imaging equipment, it is expensive to generate a satisfactory image. Super-resolution (SR) is a technique that enhances an imaging system’s resolution, which is effective and cost-efficient for MR imaging. In recent years, deep learning-based SR methods have made remarkable progress on natural images but not on medical images. Most existing medical images SR algorithms focus on the spatial information of a single image but ignore the temporal correlation between medical images sequence. We proposed two novel architectures for single medical image and sequential medical images, respectively. The multi-scale back-projection network (MSBPN) is constructed of several different scale back-projection units which consist of iterative up- and down-sampling layers. The multi-scale machine extracts different scale spatial information and strengthens the information fusion for a single image. Based on MSBPN, we proposed an accurate and lightweight Multi-Scale Bidirectional Fusion Attention Network(MSBFAN) that combines temporal information iteratively. That supplementary temporal information is extracted from the adjacent image sequence of the target image. The MSBFAN can effectively learn both the spatio-temporal dependencies and the iterative refinement process with only a lightweight number of parameters. Experimental results demonstrate that our MSBPN and MSBFAN are outperforming current SR methods in terms of reconstruction accuracy and parameter quantity of the model.