Paper Detail

PhyMRI-SR: Toward Physics-Aware MRI Image Super-Resolution

Lihua Wei, Huatong Gao, Jia Gong, Zhiyu Tan, Hao Li, Jun Liu, Zhihua Ren

huggingface Score 4.5

Published 2026-07-07 · First seen 2026-07-10

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Abstract

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) super-resolution is vital for improving diagnostic accessibility, yet most methods treat it as a deterministic mapping from a fixed low-resolution input to a high-resolution target. This overlooks a key property of MRI acquisition physics: spatial resolution and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) are inherently coupled, making any given low-resolution scan merely one of many possible realizations under varying acquisition trade-offs. We rethink MRI super-resolution as a physics-aware reconstruction problem, in which the goal is to identify the optimal resolution-SNR configuration and then super-resolve it to obtain high-quality MRI results. A key implication of this formulation is that MRI resolution becomes dynamic rather than fixed. To handle such resolution-heterogeneous inputs, we adapt 2D Gaussian Splatting (2D GS) to MRI by formulating reconstruction as a coordinate-based, resolution-agnostic rendering problem. To further enhance fidelity, we introduce three innovations: (1) a prior-aware Gaussian representation that combines an Anatomical Structure Prior for tissue-specific kernel initialization with an Imaging System Prior that captures hardware characteristics via a covariance dictionary; (2) a physics-constrained signal modeling scheme that predicts intrinsic tissue parameters (proton density rho and effective relaxation rate R2) and synthesizes intensities through governing physical equations, ensuring biophysically plausible contrast; and (3) a meta-learning framework that alleviates paired-data scarcity by pretraining on simulated data and adapting to real-world conditions. Extensive experiments on dynamic-resolution datasets and standard benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, highlighting its strong potential for clinical deployment.

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BibTeX

@misc{wei2026phymri,
  title = {PhyMRI-SR: Toward Physics-Aware MRI Image Super-Resolution},
  author = {Lihua Wei and Huatong Gao and Jia Gong and Zhiyu Tan and Hao Li and Jun Liu and Zhihua Ren},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) super-resolution is vital for improving diagnostic accessibility, yet most methods treat it as a deterministic mapping from a fixed low-resolution input to a high-resolution target. This overlooks a key property of MRI acquisition physics: spatial resolution and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) are inherently coupled, making any given low-resolution scan merely one of many possible realizations under varying acquisition trade-offs. We rethink MRI super-resolution as a},
  url = {https://huggingface.co/papers/2607.06238},
  keywords = {Gaussian Splatting, Anatomical Structure Prior, Imaging System Prior, proton density, effective relaxation rate, biophysically plausible contrast, meta-learning, simulated data, real-world adaptation, code available, huggingface daily},
  eprint = {2607.06238},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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