Mamba-Enhanced Diffusion Model for Perception-Aware Blind Super-Resolution of Magnetic Resonance Imaging

High-resolution magnetic resonance imaging (HR MRI) can provide accurate and rich information for doctors to better detect subtle lesions, delineate tumor boundaries, evaluate small anatomical structures, and assess early-stage pathological changes that might be obscured in lower resolution images. However, the acquisition of HR MRI images often requires prolonged scanning time, which causes the patient's physical and mental discomfort. The patient's slight movement may produce the motion artifacts and make the obtained MRI image become blurry, affecting the accuracy of clinical diagnosis. To tackle these problems, we propose a novel method, Mamba-enhanced Diffusion Model (MDM) for perception-aware blind super-resolution of Magnetic Resonance Imaging, which includes two important components: kernel noise estimator and SR reconstructor. Specifically, we propose a Perception-aware Blur Kernel Noise estimator (PBKN estimator), which takes advantage of the diffusion model to estimate the blur kernel from low-resolution images. Meanwhile, we construct a novel progressive feature reconstructor, which takes the estimated blur kernel and the content information of LR images as prior knowledge to reconstruct more accurate SR MRI images by using diffusion model. Moreover, we design a novel Semantic Information Fusion Mamba (SIF-Mamba) module for the SR reconstruction task. SIF-Mamba is specifically designed in the progressive feature reconstructor to capture the global context of MRI images and improve the feature reconstruction. The extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed MDM achieves better SR reconstruction results than several outstanding methods.