Super-resolution of biomedical volumes with 2D supervision
This addresses barriers to integrating 3D volumetric microscopy into clinical medicine and biomedical research, offering a potential improvement for diagnostic accuracy, though it is incremental as it builds on existing super-resolution and diffusion methods.
The paper tackles the problem of poor depth resolution and slow acquisition in 3D volumetric biomedical microscopy by introducing masked slice diffusion for super-resolution (MSDSR), which uses abundant 2D data to enhance 3D volumes, demonstrating superior performance over baselines with a new metric, SliceFID.
Volumetric biomedical microscopy has the potential to increase the diagnostic information extracted from clinical tissue specimens and improve the diagnostic accuracy of both human pathologists and computational pathology models. Unfortunately, barriers to integrating 3-dimensional (3D) volumetric microscopy into clinical medicine include long imaging times, poor depth / z-axis resolution, and an insufficient amount of high-quality volumetric data. Leveraging the abundance of high-resolution 2D microscopy data, we introduce masked slice diffusion for super-resolution (MSDSR), which exploits the inherent equivalence in the data-generating distribution across all spatial dimensions of biological specimens. This intrinsic characteristic allows for super-resolution models trained on high-resolution images from one plane (e.g., XY) to effectively generalize to others (XZ, YZ), overcoming the traditional dependency on orientation. We focus on the application of MSDSR to stimulated Raman histology (SRH), an optical imaging modality for biological specimen analysis and intraoperative diagnosis, characterized by its rapid acquisition of high-resolution 2D images but slow and costly optical z-sectioning. To evaluate MSDSR's efficacy, we introduce a new performance metric, SliceFID, and demonstrate MSDSR's superior performance over baseline models through extensive evaluations. Our findings reveal that MSDSR not only significantly enhances the quality and resolution of 3D volumetric data, but also addresses major obstacles hindering the broader application of 3D volumetric microscopy in clinical diagnostics and biomedical research.