Decomposition-Based Variational Network for Multi-Contrast MRI Super-Resolution and Reconstruction

Multi-contrast MRI super-resolution (SR) and reconstruction methods aim to explore complementary information from the reference image to help the reconstruction of the target image. Existing deep learning-based methods usually manually design fusion rules to aggregate the multi-contrast images, fail to model their correlations accurately and lack certain interpretations. Against these issues, we propose a multi-contrast variational network (MC-VarNet) to explicitly model the relationship of multi-contrast images. Our model is constructed based on an intuitive motivation that multi-contrast images have consistent (edges and structures) and inconsistent (contrast) information. We thus build a model to reconstruct the target image and decompose the reference image as a common component and a unique component. In the feature interaction phase, only the common component is transferred to the target image. We solve the variational model and unfold the iterative solutions into a deep network. Hence, the proposed method combines the good interpretability of model-based methods with the powerful representation ability of deep learning-based methods. Experimental results on the multi-contrast MRI reconstruction and SR demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model. Especially, since we explicitly model the multi-contrast images, our model is more robust to the reference images with noises and large inconsistent structures. The code is available at https://github.com/lpcccc-cv/MC-VarNet.