STADNet: Spatial-Temporal Attention-Guided Dual-Path Network for cardiac cine MRI super-resolution

Cardiac cine magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a commonly used clinical tool for evaluating cardiac function and morphology. However, its diagnostic accuracy may be compromised by the low spatial resolution. Current methods for cine MRI super-resolution reconstruction still have limitations. They typically rely on 3D convolutional neural networks or recurrent neural networks, which may not effectively capture long-range or non-local features due to their limited receptive fields. Optical flow estimators are also commonly used to align neighboring frames, which may cause information loss and inaccurate motion estimation. Additionally, pre-warping strategies may involve interpolation, leading to potential loss of texture details and complicated anatomical structures. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel Spatial-Temporal Attention-Guided Dual-Path Network (STADNet) for cardiac cine MRI super-resolution. We utilize transformers to model long-range dependencies in cardiac cine MR images and design a cross-frame attention module in the location-aware spatial path, which enhances the spatial details of the current frame by using complementary information from neighboring frames. We also introduce a recurrent flow-enhanced attention module in the motion-aware temporal path that exploits the correlation between cine MRI frames and extracts the motion information of the heart. Experimental results demonstrate that STADNet outperforms SOTA approaches and has significant potential for clinical practice. •Present a spatial–temporal attention-guided dual-path network for cine MRI super-resolution.•Propose a position-weighted cross-frame attention for correlation exploration.•Develop a recurrent flow-enhanced attention module to enhance fine details recovery.•The performance of STADNet outperforms the SOTA methods on two datasets.