# Efficient Structurally-Strengthened Generative Adversarial Network for MRI Reconstruction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.03858 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03858/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 11 Aug 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Edge-Enhanced Dual Discriminator Generative Adversarial Network for Fast MRI with Parallel Imaging Using Multi-view Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05758/) (2021)
- [Encoding Enhanced Complex CNN for Accurate and Highly Accelerated MRI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11977/) (2023)
- [Score-based Generative Priors Guided Model-driven Network for MRI Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.02958/) (2024)
- [MCU-Net: A Multi-prior Collaborative Deep Unfolding Network with Gates-controlled Spatial Attention for Accelerated MR Image Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03383/) (2024)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Magnetic Resonance Image Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07097/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Compressed sensing based magnetic resonance imaging (CS-MRI) provides an efficient way to reduce scanning time of MRI. Recently deep learning has been introduced into CS-MRI to further improve the image quality and shorten reconstruction time. In this paper, we propose an efficient structurally strengthened Generative Adversarial Network, termed ESSGAN, for reconstructing MR images from highly under-sampled k-space data. ESSGAN consists of a structurally strengthened generator (SG) and a discriminator. In SG, we introduce strengthened connections (SCs) to improve the utilization of the feature maps between the proposed strengthened convolutional autoencoders (SCAEs), where each SCAE is a variant of a typical convolutional autoencoder. In addition, we creatively introduce a residual in residual block (RIRB) to SG. RIRB increases the depth of SG, thus enhances feature expression ability of SG. Moreover, it can give the encoder blocks and the decoder blocks richer texture features. To further reduce artifacts and preserve more image details, we introduce an enhanced structural loss to SG. ESSGAN can provide higher image quality with less model parameters than the state-of-the-art deep learning-based methods at different undersampling rates of different subsampling masks, and reconstruct a 256*256 MR image in tens of milliseconds.