PhyMRI-SR: Toward Physics-Aware MRI Image Super-Resolution
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| Authors | Lihua Wei et al. |
| Year | 2026 |
| HF Upvotes | 4 |
| arXiv | 2607.06238 |
| Download | |
| HF Page | View on Hugging Face |
Abstract
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) super-resolution is vital for improving diagnostic accessibility, yet most methods treat it as a deterministic mapping from a fixed low-resolution input to a high-resolution target. This overlooks a key property of MRI acquisition physics: spatial resolution and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) are inherently coupled, making any given low-resolution scan merely one of many possible realizations under varying acquisition trade-offs. We rethink MRI super-resolution as a physics-aware reconstruction problem, in which the goal is to identify the optimal resolution-SNR configuration and then super-resolve it to obtain high-quality MRI results. A key implication of this formulation is that MRI resolution becomes dynamic rather than fixed. To handle such resolution-heterogeneous inputs, we adapt 2D Gaussian Splatting (2D GS) to MRI by formulating reconstruction as a coordinate-based, resolution-agnostic rendering problem. To further enhance fidelity, we introduce three innovations: (1) a prior-aware Gaussian representation that combines an Anatomical Structure Prior for tissue-specific kernel initialization with an Imaging System Prior that captures hardware characteristics via a covariance dictionary; (2) a physics-constrained signal modeling scheme that predicts intrinsic tissue parameters (proton density rho and effective relaxation rate R2) and synthesizes intensities through governing physical equations, ensuring biophysically plausible contrast; and (3) a meta-learning framework that alleviates paired-data scarcity by pretraining on simulated data and adapting to real-world conditions. Extensive experiments on dynamic-resolution datasets and standard benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, highlighting its strong potential for clinical deployment.
Engineering Breakdown
The Problem
We rethink MRI super-resolution as a physics-aware reconstruction problem, in which the goal is to identify the optimal resolution-SNR configuration and then super-resolve it to obtain high-quality MRI results. To handle such resolution-heterogeneous inputs, we adapt 2D Gaussian Splatting (2D GS) to MRI by formulating reconstruction as a coordinate-based, resolution-agnostic rendering problem.
The Approach
To further enhance fidelity, we introduce three innovations: (1) a prior-aware Gaussian representation that combines an Anatomical Structure Prior for tissue-specific kernel initialization with an Imaging System Prior that captures hardware characteristics via a covariance dictionary; (2) a physics-constrained signal modeling scheme that predicts intrinsic tissue parameters (proton density rho and effective relaxation rate R2) and synthesizes intensities through governing physical equations, ensuring biophysically plausible contrast; and (3) a meta-learning framework that alleviates paired-data scarcity by pretraining on simulated data and adapting to real-world conditions.
Key Results
Extensive experiments on dynamic-resolution datasets and standard benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, highlighting its strong potential for clinical deployment.
Research Areas
This paper contributes to the following areas of AI/ML engineering:
- Machine learning
- Deep learning
- Neural networks
- Model optimization
- AI systems
- Physicsaware
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