Swin Transformer Applied to Breast MRI Super-Resolution in a Cross-cohort Dataset

Advancements in the care for patients with breast cancer have demanded the development of biomechanical breast models for the planning and risk mitigation of such invasive surgical procedures. However, these approaches require large amounts of high-quality magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) training data that is of difficult acquisition and availability. Although this can be solved using synthetic data, generating high resolution images comes at the price of very high computational constraints and tipically low performances. On the other hand, producing lower resolution samples yields better results and efficiency but falls short of meeting health professional standards. Therefore, this work aims to validate a joint approach between lower resolution generative models and the proposed super-resolution architecture, titled Shifted Window Image Restoration (SWinIR), which was used to achieve a 4x increase in image size of breast cancer patient MRI samples. Results prove to be promising and to further expand upon the super-resolution state-of-the-art, achieving good maximum peak signal-to-noise ratio of 41.36 and structural similarity index values of 0.962 and thus beating traditional methods and other machine learning architectures.