Unsupervised arterial spin labeling image superresolution via multiscale generative adversarial network

Arterial spin labeling (ASL) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is an advanced noninvasive imaging technology that can measure cerebral blood flow (CBF) quantitatively without a contrast agent injection or radiation exposure. However, because of the weak labeling, conventional ASL images usually suffer from low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), poor spatial resolution, and long acquisition time. Therefore, a method that can simultaneously improve the spatial resolution and SNR is needed.In this work, we proposed an unsupervised superresolution (SR) method to improve ASL image resolution based on a pyramid of generative adversarial networks (GAN). Through layer-by-layer training, the generators can learn features from the coarsest to the finest. The last layer's generator that contains fine details and textures was used to generate the final SR ASL images. In our proposed framework, the corresponding T1-weighted MR image was supplied as a second-channel input of the generators to provide high-resolution prior information. In addition, a low-pass-filter loss term was included to suppress the noise of the original ASL images. To evaluate the performance of the proposed framework, a simulation study and two real-patient experiments based on the in vivo datasets obtained from three healthy subjects on a 3T MR scanner were conducted, regarding the low-resolution (LR) to normal-resolution (NR) and the NR-to-SR tasks. The proposed method was compared to the nearest neighbor interpolation, trilinear interpolation, third-order B-splines interpolation methods, and deep image prior (DIP) with the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity index (SSIM) as the quantification metrics. The averaged ASL images acquired with 44 min acquisition time were used as the ground truth for real-patient LR-to-NR study. The ablation studies of low-pass-filter loss term and T1-weighted MR image were performed based on simulation data.For the simulation study, results show that the proposed method achieved significantly higher PSNR ( p$p$ -value <$<$ 0.05) and SSIM ( p$p$ -value <$<$ 0.05) than the nearest neighbor interpolation, trilinear interpolation, third-order B-splines interpolation, and DIP methods. For the real-patient LR-to-NR experiment, results show that the proposed method can generate high-quality SR ASL images with clearer structure boundaries and low noise levels and has the highest mean PSNR and SSIM. For real-patient NR-to-SR tasks, the structure of the results using the proposed method is sharper and clearer, which are the most similar to the structure of the reference 44 min acquisition image than other methods. The proposed method also shows the ability to remove artifacts in the NR image while superresolution. The ablation study verified that the low-pass-filter loss term and T1-weighted MR image are necessary for the proposed method.The proposed unsupervised multiscale GAN framework can simultaneously improve spatial resolution and reduce image noise. Experiment results from simulation data and three healthy subjects show that the proposed method achieves better performance than the nearest neighbor interpolation, the trilinear interpolation, the third-order B-splines interpolation, and DIP methods.