High resolution magnetic resonance (MR) imaging is desirable in many clinical applications due to its contribution to more accurate subsequent analyses and early clinical diagnoses. Single image super-resolution (SISR) is an effective and cost efficient alternative technique to improve the spatial resolution of MR images. In the past few years, SISR methods based on deep learning techniques, especially convolutional neural networks (CNNs), have achieved state-of-the-art performance on natural images. However, the information is gradually weakened and training becomes increasingly difficult as the network deepens. The problem is more serious for medical images because lacking high quality and effective training samples makes deep models prone to underfitting or overfitting. Nevertheless, many current models treat the hierarchical features on different channels equivalently, which is not helpful for the models to deal with the hierarchical features discriminatively and targetedly. To this end, we present a novel channel splitting network (CSN) to ease the representational burden of deep models. The proposed CSN model divides the hierarchical features into two branches, i.e., residual branch and dense branch, with different information transmissions. The residual branch is able to promote feature reuse, while the dense branch is beneficial to the exploration of new features. Besides, we also adopt the merge-and-run mapping to facilitate information integration between different branches. Extensive experiments on various MR images, including proton density (PD), T1 and T2 images, show that the proposed CSN model achieves superior performance over other state-of-the-art SISR methods.

Efficient and lightweight single-image super-resolution (SISR) has achieved remarkable performance in recent years. One effective approach is the use of large kernel designs, which have been shown to improve the performance of SISR models while reducing their computational requirements. However, current state-of-the-art (SOTA) models still face problems such as high computational costs. To address these issues, we propose the Large Kernel Distillation Network (LKDN) in this paper. Our approach simplifies the model structure and introduces more efficient attention modules to reduce computational costs while also improving performance. Specifically, we employ the reparameterization technique to enhance model performance without adding extra cost. We also introduce a new optimizer from other tasks to SISR, which improves training speed and performance. Our experimental results demonstrate that LKDN outperforms existing lightweight SR methods and achieves SOTA performance.

High-quality magnetic resonance (MR) images afford more detailed information for reliable diagnoses and quantitative image analyses. Given low-resolution (LR) images, the deep convolutional neural network (CNN) has shown its promising ability for image super-resolution (SR). The LR MR images usually share some visual characteristics: structural textures of different sizes, edges with high correlation, and less informative background. However, multi-scale structural features are informative for image reconstruction, while the background is more smooth. Most previous CNN-based SR methods use a single receptive field and equally treat the spatial pixels (including the background). It neglects to sense the entire space and get diversified features from the input, which is critical for high-quality MR image SR. We propose a wide weighted attention multi-scale network ( $\text{W}^{2}$ AMSN) for accurate MR image SR to address these problems. On the one hand, the features of varying sizes can be extracted by the wide multi-scale branches. On the other hand, we design a non-reduction attention mechanism to recalibrate feature responses adaptively. Such attention preserves continuous cross-channel interaction and focuses on more informative regions. Meanwhile, the learnable weighted factors fuse extracted features selectively. The encapsulated wide weighted attention multi-scale block ( $\text{W}^{2}$ AMSB) is integrated through a recurrent framework and global attention mechanism. Extensive experiments and diversified ablation studies show the effectiveness of our proposed $\text{W}^{2}$ AMSN, which surpasses state-of-the-art methods on most popular MR image SR benchmarks quantitatively and qualitatively. And our method still offers superior accuracy and adaptability on real MR images.

Although deep learning has significantly facilitated the progress of single image super-resolution (SISR) in recent years, it still hits bottlenecks to further improve SR performance with the continuous growth of model scale. Therefore, one of the hotspots in the field is to construct efficient SISR models by elevating the effectiveness of feature representation. In this work, we present a straightforward and generic approach for feature enhancement that can effectively promote the performance of SR models, dubbed partial channel shifting (PCS). Specifically, it is inspired by the temporal shifting in video understanding and displaces part of the channels along the spatial dimensions, thus allowing the effective receptive field to be amplified and the feature diversity to be augmented at almost zero cost. Also, it can be assembled into off-the-shelf models as a plug-and-play component for performance boosting without extra network parameters and computational overhead. However, regulating the features with PCS encounters some issues, like shifting directions and amplitudes, proportions, patterns of shifted channels, etc. We impose some technical constraints on the issues to simplify the general channel shifting. Extensive and throughout experiments illustrate that the PCS indeed enlarges the effective receptive field, augments the feature diversity for efficiently enhancing SR recovery, and can endow obvious performance gains to existing models.

Transformer-based deep models for single image super-resolution (SISR) have greatly improved the performance of lightweight SISR tasks in recent years. However, they often suffer from heavy computational burden and slow inference due to the complex calculation of multi-head self-attention (MSA), seriously hindering their practical application and deployment. In this work, we present an efficient SR model to mitigate the dilemma between model efficiency and SR performance, which is dubbed Entropy Attention and Receptive Field Augmentation network (EARFA), and composed of a novel entropy attention (EA) and a shifting large kernel attention (SLKA). From the perspective of information theory, EA increases the entropy of intermediate features conditioned on a Gaussian distribution, providing more informative input for subsequent reasoning. On the other hand, SLKA extends the receptive field of SR models with the assistance of channel shifting, which also favors to boost the diversity of hierarchical features. Since the implementation of EA and SLKA does not involve complex computations (such as extensive matrix multiplications), the proposed method can achieve faster nonlinear inference than Transformer-based SR models while maintaining better SR performance. Extensive experiments show that the proposed model can significantly reduce the delay of model inference while achieving the SR performance comparable with other advanced models.