Accurate super-resolution reconstruction for CT and MR images

The resolution and accuracy of medical images play an important role for early medical diagnosis, since a wrong resolution may increase the risk of making a poor decision. In practice, magnetic resonance and computed tomography images often suffer from anisotropic resolution, so that the image quality is high only within the slices. In this paper we propose a further development of a previously presented super-resolution approach, to reconstruct isotropic high resolution images from only two orthogonal low resolution data sets. Thereby, voxel uncertainties, which arise during image acquisition and preprocessing, are considered. Furthermore, an adapted inpainting method is introduced to ensure a better initial estimation of missing data. Reconstruction quality is also improved, by combining regional and local information. Experiments on synthetic and clinical data sets reveal significant improvement of image quality and accuracy, yielding better results when compared with conventional reconstruction approaches.