Physics-Guided Multi-Objective Deep Learning for Ultrasound RF Data Interpolation in Resource-Constrained Imaging

Through-plane resolution in clinical MRI is typically much coarser than in-plane resolution, limiting diagnostic utility. This work investigates deep learning approaches to interpolate intermediate MRI slices in prostate imaging, effectively doubling through-plane resolution. I evaluated five architectures (CNN, U-Net, two GAN variants, and DDPM) and discovered that problem formulation has dramatically more impact than architectural complexity. By reformulating the interpolation task to use adjacent slices (i-1, i+1) rather than distant slices (i-2, i+2), I achieved a 58% improvement in SSIM performance across all deterministic architectures. The U-Net model achieved the best results with PSNR of 30.08 dB and SSIM of 0.898, representing a 10.1% improvement over linear interpolation baseline. A DDPM was also evaluated but showed poor reconstruction quality due to fundamental mismatch between stochastic generation and deterministic reconstruction requirements. These findings demonstrate that problem formulation can have 290x more impact than architectural sophistication in medical imaging tasks.

MG-SpaIR is a training-data-free framework for restoring a clean image from a single observation corrupted by a mixture of blur, downsampling, noise, and missing pixels. Building on implicit neural representations (INRs), we introduce a multi-grade coarse-to-fine residual hierarchy that progressively refines the reconstruction across resolution grades, improving representational fidelity and mitigating spectral limitations. To stabilize reconstruction optimization and suppress INR-induced artifacts, we further propose an explicit sparse proximal regularization (e.g., $\ell_0$-type) applied directly in the high-resolution image domain, which discourages spurious high-frequency patterns while preserving sharp structures. The resulting optimization is solved efficiently via a multi-grade proximal alternating scheme, and we establish convergence guarantees for the associated updates under standard regularity conditions. Experiments on mixed-degradation benchmarks demonstrate that MG-SpaIR consistently outperforms strong training-data-free baselines such as Deep Image Prior, providing a stable, interpretable, and data-efficient alternative to conventional learning-based restoration methods.

Acoustic shadows from bone and other highly attenuating tissues obscure clinically important structures in ultrasound. In fetal brain imaging, skull-induced artefacts disproportionately degrade the hemisphere closer to the transducer (proximal), limiting symmetric assessment of the two hemispheres. Existing correction methods require raw scanner data, impose restrictive assumptions on tissue properties, or rely on generative models that may hallucinate anatomy. We present RFlash, a physics-informed post-processing method that decomposes beamformed ultrasound images into explicit attenuation and scatter-intensity maps using a differentiable radiance-field formulation of image formation. Attenuation-adaptive re-rendering then removes the dependence of the signal at each depth on the intervening tissue, equivalent to virtually advancing the transducer into the tissue. Across 1,261 3D fetal brain volumes, 143 real 2D curvilinear abdominal scans, and 1,200 simulated 2D linear-probe liver scans, RFlash reduces shadow-related intensity differences more effectively than classical Hughes-Duck attenuation correction. For a gestational-age model trained on the distal hemisphere (further from the transducer) and applied to the proximal hemisphere, prediction error decreases by 5.1 days (40%) relative to the original images. The estimated attenuation maps also yield shadow-confidence maps that improve random-forest bone-shadow segmentation over the image alone and receive greater SHAP importance than an existing neural confidence-map baseline, suggesting greater physical consistency. RFlash requires neither hardware modification nor access to raw scanner data and supports 2D and 3D acquisitions with linear and curvilinear probes, making it widely applicable allowing clinicians to use our method on their already acquired scanners and images.