A Tool for Super-Resolving Multimodal Clinical MRI

Abstract

We present a tool for resolution recovery in multimodal clinical magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Such images exhibit great variability, both biological and instrumental. This variability makes automated processing with neuroimaging analysis software very challenging. This leaves intelligence extractable only from large-scale analyses of clinical data untapped, and impedes the introduction of automated predictive systems in clinical care. The tool presented in this paper enables such processing, via inference in a generative model of thick-sliced, multi-contrast MR scans. All model parameters are estimated from the observed data, without the need for manual tuning. The model-driven nature of the approach means that no type of training is needed for applicability to the diversity of MR contrasts present in a clinical context. We show on simulated data that the proposed approach outperforms conventional model-based techniques, and on a large hospital dataset of multimodal MRIs that the tool can successfully super-resolve very thick-sliced images. The implementation is available from https://github.com/brudfors/spm_superres.