Cited by 36Advanced Image Processing TechniquesGenerative Adversarial Networks and Image SynthesisImage and Signal Denoising Methods

MRI Super-Resolution With Partial Diffusion Models

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Zhao, Kai, Pang, Kaifeng, Hung, Alex Ling Yu, Zheng, Haoxin, Yan, Ran, Sung, Kyunghyun·2025·IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging

Abstract

Diffusion models have achieved impressive performance on various image generation tasks, including image super-resolution. Despite their impressive performance, diffusion models suffer from high computational costs due to the large number of denoising steps. In this paper, we proposed a novel accelerated diffusion model, termed Partial Diffusion Models (PDMs), for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) super-resolution. We observed that the latents of diffusing a pair of low- and high-resolution images gradually converge and become indistinguishable after a certain noise level. This inspires us to use certain low-resolution latent to approximate corresponding high-resolution latent. With the approximation, we can skip part of the diffusion and denoising steps, reducing the computation in training and inference. To mitigate the approximation error, we further introduced 'latent alignment' that gradually interpolates and approaches the high-resolution latents from the low-resolution latents. Partial diffusion models, in conjunction with latent alignment, essentially establish a new trajectory where the latents, unlike those in original diffusion models, gradually transition from low-resolution to high-resolution images. Experiments on three MRI datasets demonstrate that partial diffusion models achieve competetive super-resolution quality with significantly fewer denoising steps than original diffusion models. In addition, they can be incorporated with recent accelerated diffusion models to further enhance the efficiency.

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  • A pronounced domain gap exists between images and videos.

    “Second, a pronounced domain gap exists between images and videos21–23.”

    From Temporally consistent low-light face video enhancement via video-to-video conditional diffusion (2026) · cites this paper as [23]

    The Introduction describes a statistical disparity between low- and high-resolution image latents, not a domain gap between images and videos. A search for an image–video domain gap and related terms found no passage in our copy addressing that claim; page numbers were unavailable. (LLM, conf=0.76)

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Research works printed but not linked: 3

  1. [3]Goodfellow I, Pouget-Abadie J, Mirza M, Xu B, Warde-Farley D, Ozair S, Courville A, and Bengio Y, “ Generative adversarial nets,” in Neural Information Processing Systems, Ghahramani Z, Welling M, Cortes C, Lawrence N, and Weinberger K, Eds., vol. 27. Curran Associates, Inc., 2014.
  2. [28]Lu C, Zhou Y, Bao F, Chen J, Li C, and Zhu J, “ Dpm-solver: A fast ode solver for diffusion probabilistic model sampling in around 10 steps,” in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2022.
  3. [37]Litjens G, Debats O, Barentsz J, Karssemeijer N, and Huisman H, “ Prostatex challenge data,” Cancer Imaging Arch, vol. 10, p. K9TCIA, 2017.

Cited by

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Authors
Zhao, K., Pang, K., Hung, A. L. Y., Zheng, H., Yan, R., & Sung, K.
Affiliations
University of California, Los Angeles (US)
Venue
IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging
Published
2025-03
Volume
44
Issue
3
Pages
1194-1205
ISSN
  • 0278-0062 (ISSN-L)
  • 1558-254X
OpenAlex
W4403511234
Cited by
36
References
42
Citations by year
2026: 20 · 2025: 13 · 2024: 3
FWCI
5.00
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (acceptedVersion)
  • PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
  • eScholarship (California Digital Library) (submittedVersion)
Funders
  • National Institutes of Health (R01-CA248506, R01-CA272702)
  • Integrated Diagnostics Program of the Department of Radiological Sciences and Department of Pathology, David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California at Los Angeles
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Advanced Image Processing Techniques
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Generative Adversarial Networks and Image Synthesis
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Image and Signal Denoising Methods
Keywords
MRI super-resolution, diffusion models, latent alignment, accelerated diffusion, denoising steps, image super-resolution
MeSH terms
Algorithms, Brain, Humans, Image Processing, Computer-Assisted, Magnetic Resonance Imaging

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