Implicit neural representations (INRs) have emerged as a powerful paradigm for medical imaging via physics-informed unsupervised learning. Classical INRs optimize an entire network from scratch for each subject, leading to inefficient training and suboptimal imaging quality. Recent initialization-based approaches attempt to inject population priors into pre-trained networks, yet they rely on high-quality images and often suffer from catastrophic forgetting during fine-tuning. We present DisINR, a novel INR framework that explicitly disentangles shared and subject-specific representations. DisINR introduces a shared encoder-decoder pair and subject-specific encoders, whose features are jointly decoded for image reconstruction. By integrating differentiable forward models, it pre-trains the shared modules directly from limited raw measurements, removing the need for pre-acquired high-quality images. During test-time adaptation, only the subject-specific encoder is optimized, while the shared pair remains frozen, effectively preserving learned priors. Extensive evaluations on three representative medical imaging tasks show that DisINR significantly outperforms state-of-the-art INRs in both reconstruction accuracy and efficiency.
Cardiac cine Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is a critical diagnostic tool that provides dynamic insights for radiologists. To accelerate acquisition, under-sampled k-space data is often used, requiring reconstruction methods that combine coil sensitivity encoding with prior information to recover missing data. Deep learning approaches have gained more attention for leveraging data-adaptive priors. While supervised learning approaches are a common choice, they depend on fully sampled reference data, which is not always available. Unsupervised methods eliminate the need for fully sampled reference data, which can be advantageous in cardiac cine MRI reconstruction. Among them, implicit neural representations (INRs) have shown great potential due to their simple architecture and good quality reconstructions. In this work, we propose an image-domain dual-branch INR framework, termed I-FP-INR, which extends the original INR design by introducing an additional feature-processing branch. This design aims to extract complementary feature embeddings to enhance the overall representation, thereby benefiting reconstruction. Extensive evaluations on both public datasets and in-house data show consistent improvements over baseline methods in reconstruction quality, with strong robustness across varied scenarios.
Implicit neural representation (INR) methods provide continuous coordinate-to-value mappings and integrate naturally with direct volume rendering, making them attractive for representing volumetric data. However, existing INR-based approaches for volumetric data are inherently lossy, and even small reconstruction errors can propagate through rendering and downstream analysis. In this work, we explore Lossless-INR, a lossless INR framework for 3D scientific volumetric data based on bit-plane decomposition. By decomposing each voxel value into binary bit-planes, we reformulate reconstruction as per-bit binary classification, so that exact recovery reduces to predicting every bit correctly. To make this optimization tractable while keeping the representation compact, we combine an octree block-partitioning strategy that adaptively subdivides complex regions with a ternary feature-grid network whose grid entries are parameterized by a ternary set of values. Experiments on diverse volumetric datasets show that this design can achieve zero bit-error rate and bit-exact reconstruction, enabling faithful rendering and downstream analysis with a compact representation. The code is available at https://github.com/TouKaienn/Lossless-INR.
Continuous parameterization of medical data has emerged as a powerful paradigm for resolution-independent image representation. While Implicit Neural Representations offer high fidelity and compact storage, their reliance on global Multi-Layer Perceptrons incurs sizeable computational costs, large memory requirements, and extensive optimization times. As medical imaging trends towards ever-more detailed, high-resolution volumes, these costs impose significant bottlenecks in the applicability of implicit approaches. Recently, explicit Gaussian-based primitives have revolutionized the representation learning paradigm by trading deep network evaluations for localized, rasterization-friendly primitives. In this paper, we present a comprehensive, cross-dimensional evaluation of Gaussian representations against implicit approaches for medical imaging applications. First, we outline a theoretical overview on the mathematical properties offered by explicit primitives beyond what is capable under the implicit neural paradigm. Subsequently, we benchmark the computational performance on two demanding image datasets: 2D microscopy histology and 3D lung Computed Tomography (CT). Our experiments demonstrate that Gaussian representations consistently match or surpass reconstruction metrics compared to implicit methods across all compression factors, while displaying significantly lower optimization times, and memory requirements. Together with the compelling mathematical properties offered by explicit primitives, these findings motivate the wider adoption of Gaussian representations and position them as an attractive direction for future research in medical imaging.