Spatial attention-based implicit neural representation for arbitrary reduction of MRI slice spacing

Magnetic resonance (MR) images collected in 2D clinical protocols typically have large inter-slice spacing, resulting in high in-plane resolution and reduced through-plane resolution. Super-resolution technique can enhance the through-plane resolution of MR images to facilitate downstream visualization and computer-aided diagnosis. However, most existing works train the super-resolution network at a fixed scaling factor, which is not friendly to clinical scenes of varying inter-slice spacing in MR scanning. Inspired by the recent progress in implicit neural representation, we propose a Spatial Attention-based Implicit Neural Representation (SA-INR) network for arbitrary reduction of MR inter-slice spacing. The SA-INR aims to represent an MR image as a continuous implicit function of 3D coordinates. In this way, the SA-INR can reconstruct the MR image with arbitrary inter-slice spacing by continuously sampling the coordinates in 3D space. In particular, a local-aware spatial attention operation is introduced to model nearby voxels and their affinity more accurately in a larger receptive field. Meanwhile, to improve the computational efficiency, a gradient-guided gating mask is proposed for applying the local-aware spatial attention to selected areas only. We evaluate our method on the public HCP-1200 dataset and the clinical knee MR dataset to demonstrate its superiority over other existing methods.