An end-to-end implicit neural representation architecture for medical volume data

PLoS One. 2025 Jan 3;20(1):e0314944. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0314944. eCollection 2025.

Abstract

Medical volume data are rapidly increasing, growing from gigabytes to petabytes, which presents significant challenges in organisation, storage, transmission, manipulation, and rendering. To address the challenges, we propose an end-to-end architecture for data compression, leveraging advanced deep learning technologies. This architecture consists of three key modules: downsampling, implicit neural representation (INR), and super-resolution (SR). We employ a trade-off point method to optimise each module's performance and achieve the best balance between high compression rates and reconstruction quality. Experimental results on multi-parametric MRI data demonstrate that our method achieves a high compression rate of up to 97.5% while maintaining superior reconstruction accuracy, with a Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) of 40.05 dB and Structural Similarity Index (SSIM) of 0.96. This approach significantly reduces GPU memory requirements and processing time, making it a practical solution for handling large medical datasets.

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Data Compression* / methods
  • Deep Learning
  • Humans
  • Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / methods
  • Magnetic Resonance Imaging* / methods
  • Neural Networks, Computer*
  • Signal-To-Noise Ratio

Grants and funding

This research was partially supported by the EU Horizon Project-ACMod (No. 101130271). Zongcai Ruan was supported by STI2030-Major Projects of China (2021ZD0204002). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.