Fine-tuned Generative Adversarial Network-based Model for Medical Images Super-Resolution

In medical image analysis, low-resolution images negatively affect the performance of medical image interpretation and may cause misdiagnosis. Single image super-resolution (SISR) methods can improve the resolution and quality of medical images. Currently, Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) based super-resolution models have shown very good performance. Real-Enhanced Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Network (Real-ESRGAN) is one of the practical GAN-based models which is widely used in the field of general image super-resolution. One of the challenges in medical image super-resolution is that, unlike natural images, medical images do not have high spatial resolution. To solve this problem, we can use transfer learning technique and fine-tune the model that has been trained on external datasets (often natural datasets). In our proposed approach, the pre-trained generator and discriminator networks of the Real-ESRGAN model are fine-tuned using medical image datasets. In this paper, we worked on chest X-ray and retinal images and used the STARE dataset of retinal images and Tuberculosis Chest X-rays (Shenzhen) dataset for fine-tuning. The proposed model produces more accurate and natural textures, and its outputs have better detail and resolution compared to the original Real-ESRGAN outputs.