Super-resolution of cardiac magnetic resonance images using Laplacian Pyramid based on Generative Adversarial Networks

•GAN and Laplacian pyramids are combined for improved super-resolution of cardiac MRI.•RDB is introduced as a basic network unit to increase the super-resolution effect.•Least squares loss function is used to solve the vanishing gradient problem.•Progressive reconstruction method is applied to reconstruct images at different magnifications. Cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can assist in both functional and structural analysis of the heart, but due to hardware and physical limitations, high-resolution MRI scans is time consuming and peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) is low. The existing super-resolution methods attempt to resolve this issue, but there are still shortcomings, such as hallucinate details after super-resolution, low precision after reconstruction, etc. To dispose these problems, we propose the Laplacian Pyramid Generation Adversarial Network (LSRGAN) in order to generate visually better cardiovascular ultrasound images so as to aid physician diagnosis and treatment. In order to address the problem of low image resolution, we used the Laplacian Pyramid to analyze the high-frequency detail features of super-resolution (SR) reconstruction of images with different pixel sizes. To eliminate gradient disappearance, we implemented the least squares loss function as the discriminator, we introduce the residual-dense block (RDB) as the basic network building unit is used to generate higher quality images. The experimental results show that the LSRGAN can effectively avoid the illusion details after super-resolution and has the best reconstruction quality. Compared with the state-of-the-art methods, our proposed algorithm generates higher quality super-resolution images that comes with higher peak signal-to-noise ratio and structural similarity (SSIM) scores. We implemented a novel LSRGAN network model, which solves reduces insufficient resolution and hallucinate details of MRI after super-resolution. Our research presents a superior super-resolution method for medical experts to diagnose and treat myocardial ischemia and myocardial infarction.