Enhanced generative adversarial network for 3D brain MRI super-resolution

Single image super-resolution (SISR) reconstruction for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has generated significant interest because of its potential to not only speed up imaging but to improve quantitative processing and analysis of available image data. Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) have proven to perform well in image recovery tasks. In this work, we followed the GAN framework and developed a generator coupled with discriminator to tackle the task of 3D SISR on T1 brain MRI images. We developed a novel 3D memory-efficient residual-dense block generator (MRDG) that achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of PSNR (Peak Signal to Noise Ratio), SSIM (Structural Similarity) and NRMSE (Normalized Root Mean Squared Error) metrics. Paired with MRDG, we also designed a pyramid pooling discriminator (PPD) to recover details on different size scales simultaneously. Finally, we introduced model blending, a simple and computational efficient method to balance between image and texture quality in the final output, to the task of SISR on 3D images.