Lightweight Super-Resolution Techniques in Medical Imaging: Bridging Quality and Computational Efficiency

Medical imaging plays an essential role in modern healthcare, providing non-invasive tools for diagnosing and monitoring various medical conditions. However, the resolution limitations of imaging hardware often result in suboptimal images, which can hinder the precision of clinical decision-making. Single image super-resolution (SISR) techniques offer a solution by reconstructing high-resolution (HR) images from low-resolution (LR) counterparts, enhancing the visual quality of medical images. In this paper, we propose an enhanced Residual Feature Learning Network (RFLN) tailored specifically for medical imaging. Our contributions include replacing the residual local feature blocks with standard residual blocks, increasing the model depth for improved feature extraction, and incorporating enhanced spatial attention (ESA) mechanisms to refine the feature selection. Extensive experiments on medical imaging datasets demonstrate that the proposed model achieves superior performance in terms of both quantitative metrics, such as PSNR and SSIM, and qualitative visual quality compared to existing state-of-the-art models. The enhanced RFLN not only effectively mitigates noise but also preserves critical anatomical details, making it a promising solution for high-precision medical imaging applications.