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arXiv · 2109.01664

Exploring Separable Attention for Multi-Contrast MR Image Super-Resolution

Abstract

Super-resolving the Magnetic Resonance (MR) image of a target contrast under the guidance of the corresponding auxiliary contrast, which provides additional anatomical information, is a new and effective solution for fast MR imaging. However, current multi-contrast super-resolution (SR) methods tend to concatenate different contrasts directly, ignoring their relationships in different clues, e.g., in the high-intensity and low-intensity regions. In this study, we propose a separable attention network (comprising high-intensity priority attention and low-intensity separation attention), named SANet. Our SANet could explore the areas of high-intensity and low-intensity regions in the "forward" and "reverse" directions with the help of the auxiliary contrast, while learning clearer anatomical structure and edge information for the SR of a target-contrast MR image. SANet provides three appealing benefits: (1) It is the first model to explore a separable attention mechanism that uses the auxiliary contrast to predict the high-intensity and low-intensity regions regions, diverting more attention to refining any uncertain details between these regions and correcting the fine areas in the reconstructed results. (2) A multi-stage integration module is proposed to learn the response of multi-contrast fusion at multiple stages, get the dependency between the fused representations, and boost their representation ability. (3) Extensive experiments with various state-of-the-art multi-contrast SR methods on fastMRI and clinical \textit{in vivo} datasets demonstrate the superiority of our model.

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BibTeXRIS

Chun-Mei Feng, Yunlu Yan, Kai Yu, Yong Xu, Ling Shao, Huazhu Fu. 2022-08-22. Exploring Separable Attention for Multi-Contrast MR Image Super-Resolution. https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.01664

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