# Exploring Separable Attention for Multi-Contrast MR Image Super-Resolution

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.01664 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01664/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 83 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Sep 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Photo-Realistic Single Image Super-Resolution Using a Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04802/) (2016)
- [Enhanced Deep Residual Networks for Single Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02921/) (2017)
- [Image Super-Resolution Using Very Deep Residual Channel Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.02758/) (2018)
- [Image Super-Resolution Using Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1501.00092/) (2014)
- [A Survey on Deep Learning in Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05747/) (2017)
- [Self-Attention Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08318/) (2018)
- [FFDNet: Toward a Fast and Flexible Solution for CNN based Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.04026/) (2017)
- [fastMRI: An Open Dataset and Benchmarks for Accelerated MRI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08839/) (2018)
- [Plug-and-Play Image Restoration with Deep Denoiser Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.13751/) (2020)
- [Deep Learning for Image Super-resolution: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.06068/) (2019)
- [Deep Unfolding Network for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10428/) (2020)
- [Learning a Single Convolutional Super-Resolution Network for Multiple Degradations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.06116/) (2017)
- [Deep Plug-and-Play Super-Resolution for Arbitrary Blur Kernels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12529/) (2019)
- [Task Transformer Network for Joint MRI Reconstruction and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06742/) (2021)
- [Spatiotemporal Co-attention Recurrent Neural Networks for Human-Skeleton Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13245/) (2019)
- [Brain MRI Super Resolution Using 3D Deep Densely Connected Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.02728/) (2018)
- [Multi-Contrast Super-Resolution MRI Through a Progressive Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.01612/) (2019)
- [Multi-Modal Transformer for Accelerated MR Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14248/) (2021)
- [Multi-Contrast MRI Super-Resolution via a Multi-Stage Integration Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08949/) (2021)
- [Few-shot 3D Multi-modal Medical Image Segmentation using Generative Adversarial Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.12241/) (2018)
- [Simultaneous Super-Resolution and Cross-Modality Synthesis of 3D Medical Images using Weakly-Supervised Joint Convolutional Sparse Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02596/) (2017)
- [Enhanced generative adversarial network for 3D brain MRI super-resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.04835/) (2019)
- [Fine Perceptive GANs for Brain MR Image Super-Resolution in Wavelet Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.04145/) (2020)
- [MRI Super-Resolution with GAN and 3D Multi-Level DenseNet: Smaller, Faster, and Better](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01217/) (2020)
- [Dual-Octave Convolution for Accelerated Parallel MR Image Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05345/) (2021)
- [Context-Sensitive Super-Resolution for Fast Fetal Magnetic Resonance Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00035/) (2017)
- [Splenomegaly Segmentation on Multi-modal MRI using Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.04045/) (2018)
- [DONet: Dual-Octave Network for Fast MR Image Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05980/) (2021)
- [FA-GAN: Fused Attentive Generative Adversarial Networks for MRI Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03920/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Learning Federated Visual Prompt in Null Space for MRI Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16181/) (2023)
- [Specificity-Preserving Federated Learning for MR Image Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05752/) (2021)
- [Single-subject Multi-contrast MRI Super-resolution via Implicit Neural Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15065/) (2023)
- [MMR-Mamba: Multi-Modal MRI Reconstruction with Mamba and Spatial-Frequency Information Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18950/) (2024)
- [MRI Super-Resolution with Deep Learning: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16854/) (2025)
- [Towards General Text-guided Image Synthesis for Customized Multimodal Brain MRI Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16818/) (2024)
- [Model-Guided Multi-Contrast Deep Unfolding Network for MRI Super-resolution Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07030/) (2022)
- [Global and Local Mamba Network for Multi-Modality Medical Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10105/) (2025)
- [Seeking Common Ground While Reserving Differences: Multiple Anatomy Collaborative Framework for Undersampled MRI Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07364/) (2022)
- [SGSR: Structure-Guided Multi-Contrast MRI Super-Resolution via Spatio-Frequency Co-Query Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03194/) (2024)
- [Compound Attention and Neighbor Matching Network for Multi-contrast MRI Super-resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02148/) (2023)
- [Rapid Whole Brain Motion-robust Mesoscale In-vivo MR Imaging using Multi-scale Implicit Neural Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08634/) (2025)
- [Decoupling Multi-Contrast Super-Resolution: Self-Supervised Implicit Re-Representation for Unpaired Cross-Modal Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05855/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Super-resolving the Magnetic Resonance (MR) image of a target contrast under the guidance of the corresponding auxiliary contrast, which provides additional anatomical information, is a new and effective solution for fast MR imaging. However, current multi-contrast super-resolution (SR) methods tend to concatenate different contrasts directly, ignoring their relationships in different clues, e.g., in the high-intensity and low-intensity regions. In this study, we propose a separable attention network (comprising high-intensity priority attention and low-intensity separation attention), named SANet. Our SANet could explore the areas of high-intensity and low-intensity regions in the "forward" and "reverse" directions with the help of the auxiliary contrast, while learning clearer anatomical structure and edge information for the SR of a target-contrast MR image. SANet provides three appealing benefits: (1) It is the first model to explore a separable attention mechanism that uses the auxiliary contrast to predict the high-intensity and low-intensity regions regions, diverting more attention to refining any uncertain details between these regions and correcting the fine areas in the reconstructed results. (2) A multi-stage integration module is proposed to learn the response of multi-contrast fusion at multiple stages, get the dependency between the fused representations, and boost their representation ability. (3) Extensive experiments with various state-of-the-art multi-contrast SR methods on fastMRI and clinical textitin vivo datasets demonstrate the superiority of our model.