Efficient and Phase-aware Video Super-resolution for Cardiac MRI

Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Imaging (CMR) is widely used since it can illustrate the structure and function of the heart in a non-invasive and painless way. However, it is time-consuming and high-cost to acquire high-quality scans due to the hardware limitation. To this end, we propose a novel end-to-end trainable network to solve CMR video super-resolution problem without the hardware upgrade and the scanning protocol modifications. We incorporate the cardiac knowledge into our model to assist in utilizing the temporal information. Specifically, we formulate the cardiac knowledge as the periodic function, which is tailored to meet the cyclic characteristic of CMR. Besides, the proposed residual of residual learning scheme facilitates the network to learn the LR-HR mapping in a progressive refinement fashion. This mechanism enables the network to have the adaptive capability by adjusting refinement iterations depending on the difficulty of the task. Extensive experimental results on large-scale datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method compared with numerous state-of-the-art methods.