Displacement-Guided Anisotropic 3D-MRI Super-Resolution with Warp Mechanism

Enhancing the resolution of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) through super-resolution (SR) reconstruction is crucial for boosting diagnostic precision. However, current SR methods primarily rely on single LR images or multi-contrast features, limiting detail restoration. Inspired by video frame interpolation, this work utilizes the spatiotemporal correlations between adjacent slices to reformulate the SR task of anisotropic 3D-MRI image into the generation of new high-resolution (HR) slices between adjacent 2D slices. The generated SR slices are subsequently combined with the HR adjacent slices to create a new HR 3D-MRI image. We propose a innovative network architecture termed DGWMSR, comprising a backbone network and a feature supplement module (FSM). The backbone's core innovations include the displacement former block (DFB) module, which independently extracts structural and displacement features, and the maskdisplacement vector network (MDVNet) which combines with Warp mechanism to facilitate edge pixel detailing. The DFB integrates the inter-slice attention (ISA) mechanism into the Transformer, effectively minimizing the mutual interference between the two types of features and mitigating volume effects during reconstruction. Additionally, the FSM module combines self-attention with feed-forward neural network, which emphasizes critical details derived from the backbone architecture. Experimental results demonstrate the DGWMSR network outperforms current MRI SR methods on Kirby21, ANVIL-adult, and MSSEG datasets. Our code has been made publicly available on GitHub at https://github.com/Dohbby/DGWMSR.