Non-local MRI upsampling

Abstract

In Magnetic Resonance Imaging, image resolution is limited by several factors such as hardware or time constraints. In many cases, the acquired images have to be upsampled to match a specific resolution. In such cases, image interpolation techniques have been traditionally applied. However, traditional interpolation techniques are not able to recover high frequency information of the underlying high resolution data. In this paper, a new upsampling method is proposed to recover some of this high frequency information by using a data-adaptive patch-based reconstruction in combination with a subsampling coherence constraint. The proposed method has been evaluated on synthetic and real clinical cases and compared with traditional interpolation methods. The proposed method is shown to outperform classical interpolation methods compared in terms of quantitative measures and visual observation.