# Uni-COAL: A Unified Framework for Cross-Modality Synthesis and Super-Resolution of MR Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.08225 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08225/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Nov 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10196/) (2017)
- [Training Generative Adversarial Networks with Limited Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06676/) (2020)
- [Alias-Free Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12423/) (2021)
- [cGANs with Projection Discriminator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05637/) (2018)
- [Large Scale Image Completion via Co-Modulated Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10428/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Medical Image Translation with Adversarial Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08208/) (2022)
- [Meta-SR: A Magnification-Arbitrary Network for Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00875/) (2019)
- [ResViT: Residual vision transformers for multi-modal medical image synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.16031/) (2021)
- [Image Synthesis in Multi-Contrast MRI with Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01221/) (2018)
- [Segment Anything Is Not Always Perfect: An Investigation of SAM on Different Real-world Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05750/) (2023)
- [Image-to-Image Translation: Methods and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08629/) (2021)
- [FLAVR: Flow-Agnostic Video Representations for Fast Frame Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.08512/) (2020)
- [Efficient and Accurate MRI Super-Resolution using a Generative Adversarial Network and 3D Multi-Level Densely Connected Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01417/) (2018)
- [An Arbitrary Scale Super-Resolution Approach for 3D MR Images via Implicit Neural Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14476/) (2021)
- [Brain MRI Super Resolution Using 3D Deep Densely Connected Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.02728/) (2018)
- [Joint super-resolution and synthesis of 1 mm isotropic MP-RAGE volumes from clinical MRI exams with scans of different orientation, resolution and contrast](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.13340/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Progressively Volumetrized Deep Generative Models for Data-Efficient Contextual Learning of MR Image Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13913/) (2020)
- [Nucleus-aware Self-supervised Pretraining Using Unpaired Image-to-image Translation for Histopathology Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07394/) (2023)
- [Arbitrary Reduction of MRI Inter-slice Spacing Using Hierarchical Feature Conditional Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07756/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Segment Anything Model for Medical Image Segmentation: Current Applications and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03495/) (2024)
- [Angio-Diff: Learning a Self-Supervised Adversarial Diffusion Model for Angiographic Geometry Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.19455/) (2025)
- [REHRSeg: Unleashing the Power of Self-Supervised Super-Resolution for Resource-Efficient 3D MRI Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10097/) (2024)
- [Optimization of Module Transferability in Single Image Super-Resolution: Universality Assessment and Cycle Residual Blocks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03522/) (2025)
- [Unified Multimodal Model for Brain MRI Imputation and Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.16484/) (2026)
- [UniH3: Unifying Hierarchical Homogeneity and Heterogeneity for All-in-One Medical Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.11156/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Cross-modality synthesis (CMS), super-resolution (SR), and their combination (CMSR) have been extensively studied for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Their primary goals are to enhance the imaging quality by synthesizing the desired modality and reducing the slice thickness. Despite the promising synthetic results, these techniques are often tailored to specific tasks, thereby limiting their adaptability to complex clinical scenarios. Therefore, it is crucial to build a unified network that can handle various image synthesis tasks with arbitrary requirements of modality and resolution settings, so that the resources for training and deploying the models can be greatly reduced. However, none of the previous works is capable of performing CMS, SR, and CMSR using a unified network. Moreover, these MRI reconstruction methods often treat alias frequencies improperly, resulting in suboptimal detail restoration. In this paper, we propose a Unified Co-Modulated Alias-free framework (Uni-COAL) to accomplish the aforementioned tasks with a single network. The co-modulation design of the image-conditioned and stochastic attribute representations ensures the consistency between CMS and SR, while simultaneously accommodating arbitrary combinations of input/output modalities and thickness. The generator of Uni-COAL is also designed to be alias-free based on the Shannon-Nyquist signal processing framework, ensuring effective suppression of alias frequencies. Additionally, we leverage the semantic prior of Segment Anything Model (SAM) to guide Uni-COAL, ensuring a more authentic preservation of anatomical structures during synthesis. Experiments on three datasets demonstrate that Uni-COAL outperforms the alternatives in CMS, SR, and CMSR tasks for MR images, which highlights its generalizability to wide-range applications.