Robust Unsupervised Super-Resolution of Infant MRI via Dual-Modal Deep Image Prior

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is commonly used for studying infant brain development. However, due to the lengthy image acquisition time and limited subject compliance, high-quality infant MRI can be challenging. Without imposing additional burden on image acquisition, image super-resolution (SR) can be used to enhance image quality post-acquisition. Most SR techniques are supervised and trained on multiple aligned low-resolution (LR) and high-resolution (HR) image pairs, which in practice are not usually available. Unlike supervised approaches, Deep Image Prior (DIP) can be employed for unsupervised single-image SR, utilizing solely the input LR image for de novo optimization to produce an HR image. However, determining when to stop early in DIP training is non-trivial and presents a challenge to fully automating the SR process. To address this issue, we constrain the low-frequency k-space of the SR image to be similar to that of the LR image. We further improve performance by designing a dual-modal framework that leverages shared anatomical information between T1-weighted and T2-weighted images. We evaluated our model, dual-modal DIP (dmDIP), on infant MRI data acquired from birth to one year of age, demonstrating that enhanced image quality can be obtained with substantially reduced sensitivity to early stopping.