Rendering Novel Views of MRI Using 3D Gaussian Splatting

The objective of this paper is to improve radiological gradings measured on MRIs of spines, by resampling scans so that the new view planes are better aligned with the target anatomy than the original sparse images. To this end, we adapt 3D Gaussian Splatting to form a volumetric reconstruction starting from non-aligned MRIs to render imaging planes aligned with the anatomy relevant for clinical evaluation. The novel view plane is optimal for diagnostic radiological grading of the target anatomy, whereas the original MRI is not. The resampled scans are then used to predict ordinal severity grades of localised stenosis conditions in spinal MRIs. We compare our method against (1) Voxel Interpolation, which takes the average of inverse-distance weighted nearest neighbour intensities for each target coordinate, and (2) Cubic B-spline resampling, which estimates target points using a smooth piecewise-cubic function built from the source points. Experiments show that across all stenosis conditions, resampled scans using Gaussian Splatting produce more accurate stenosis gradings compared to the raw scans which do not include the complete anatomy in-plane, as well as images resampled using Voxel Interpolation or Cubic B-spline resampling.