Joint Semi-supervised 3D Super-Resolution and Segmentation with Mixed Adversarial Gaussian Domain Adaptation

Optimising the analysis of cardiac structure and function requires accurate 3D representations of shape and motion. However, techniques such as cardiac magnetic resonance imaging are conventionally limited to acquiring contiguous cross-sectional slices with low through-plane resolution and potential inter-slice spatial misalignment. Super-resolution in medical imaging aims to increase the resolution of images but is conventionally trained on features from low resolution datasets and does not super-resolve corresponding segmentations. Here we propose a semi-supervised multi-task generative adversarial network (Gemini-GAN) that performs joint super-resolution of the images and their labels using a ground truth of high resolution 3D cines and segmentations, while an unsupervised variational adversarial mixture autoencoder (V-AMA) is used for continuous domain adaptation. Our proposed approach is extensively evaluated on two transnational multi-ethnic populations of 1,331 and 205 adults respectively, delivering an improvement on state of the art methods in terms of Dice index, peak signal to noise ratio, and structural similarity index measure. This framework also exceeds the performance of state of the art generative domain adaptation models on external validation (Dice index 0.81 vs 0.74 for the left ventricle). This demonstrates how joint super-resolution and segmentation, trained on 3D ground-truth data with cross-domain generalization, enables robust precision phenotyping in diverse populations.