MRI Joint Super-Resolution and Denoising based on Conditional Stochastic Normalizing Flow

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is often limited by noise and low-resolution (LR), which can impact the precision of the diagnosis and treatment of patients. LR images and mixed noise (e.g., Gaussian noise, Rician noise, and Impulse noise) are inherent in MR images, and current approaches typically address image super-resolution (SR) reconstruction and denoising separately, resulting in a discrepancy between the actual MRI data distribution and the reconstructed images. This research introduces a new algorithm SRDSNF, the stochastic normalizing flow-based MR image SR and denoising model, which tackles SR and denoising simultaneously through a stochastic normalizing flow. Our method integrates the encoded information of the input image as a conditional variable in each reverse step of the stochastic normalizing flow, ensuring a consistent representation of the spatial distribution between the reconstructed image and the original data. Additionally, we incorporate range-null space decomposition and subsequence sampling techniques to increase the consistency between the original and constructed data and accelerate model generation. To assess the efficacy of our approach, we conducted experiments on the BrainWeb and NFBS datasets, which include simultaneous SR and denoising, standalone denoising, and standalone SR tasks. The results of the experiments illustrate that our method achieves superior SR and denoising performance with fewer sampling steps, closely approximating the ground truths. Furthermore, our results surpass those of existing methods in various tasks, showing improvement of up to 4.64 dB in PSNR and 13.8% in SSIM achieved by our SRDSNF model was contextualized against state-of-the-art approaches such as AMIR, SwinIR, and InstructIR. These methods typically report PSNR improvements ranging from 0.5 to 2 dB and SSIM increases of 3–6%, underscoring the potential clinical value of our methodology.