MedVSR: Medical Video Super-Resolution with Cross State-Space Propagation
This work addresses the challenge of improving video quality for medical diagnosis, though it appears incremental as it adapts existing video super-resolution techniques to a specific domain.
The paper tackles the problem of super-resolving low-resolution medical videos, which are crucial for diagnosis but suffer from artifacts and alignment issues, by proposing MedVSR, a framework that achieves significant performance gains over existing models in experiments across four medical datasets.
High-resolution (HR) medical videos are vital for accurate diagnosis, yet are hard to acquire due to hardware limitations and physiological constraints. Clinically, the collected low-resolution (LR) medical videos present unique challenges for video super-resolution (VSR) models, including camera shake, noise, and abrupt frame transitions, which result in significant optical flow errors and alignment difficulties. Additionally, tissues and organs exhibit continuous and nuanced structures, but current VSR models are prone to introducing artifacts and distorted features that can mislead doctors. To this end, we propose MedVSR, a tailored framework for medical VSR. It first employs Cross State-Space Propagation (CSSP) to address the imprecise alignment by projecting distant frames as control matrices within state-space models, enabling the selective propagation of consistent and informative features to neighboring frames for effective alignment. Moreover, we design an Inner State-Space Reconstruction (ISSR) module that enhances tissue structures and reduces artifacts with joint long-range spatial feature learning and large-kernel short-range information aggregation. Experiments across four datasets in diverse medical scenarios, including endoscopy and cataract surgeries, show that MedVSR significantly outperforms existing VSR models in reconstruction performance and efficiency. Code released at https://github.com/CUHK-AIM-Group/MedVSR.