In this work, we investigate the value of uncertainty modeling in 3D super-resolution with convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Deep learning has shown success in a plethora of medical image trans- formation problems, such as super-resolution (SR) and image synthesis. However, the highly ill-posed nature of such problems results in inevitable ambiguity in the learning of networks. We propose to account for intrinsic uncertainty through a per-patch heteroscedastic noise model and for parameter uncertainty through approximate Bayesian inference in the form of variational dropout. We show that the combined benefits of both lead to the state-of-the-art performance SR of diffusion MR brain images in terms of errors compared to ground truth. We further show that the reduced error scores produce tangible benefits in downstream tractography. In addition, the probabilistic nature of the methods naturally confers a mechanism to quantify uncertainty over the super-resolved output. We demonstrate through experiments on both healthy and pathological brains the potential utility of such an uncertainty measure in the risk assessment of the super-resolved images for subsequent clinical use.

本文研究了使用卷积神经网络（CNN）进行三维重建的不确定性建模的价值。通过采用每个补丁的异方差噪声模型和近似贝叶斯推理的参数不确定性，作者展示了这两者联合起来可以带来最先进的扩散MR脑图像三维重建性能。该方法的概率特性为超解析的输出提供了一种自然的量化不确定性的机制，并通过对健康和病态大脑的实验证明了这种不确定性的重要性。

基于卷积神经网络的贝叶斯图像质量转换：探索扩散磁共振成像超分辨率模糊度