Organizations: Department of Electronic Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China · Institute of Science and Technology for Brain-inspired Intelligence, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China · Institute of Diagnostic Radiology, University Hospital Zurich, University of Zurich, Zurich 8091, Switzerland · Department of Neurology, Beijing Tiantan Hospital, Capital Medical University, Beijing 100070, China · China National Clinical Research Center for Neurological Diseases, Beijing, China
MRI field-strength enhancement seeks to combine the accessibility of low-field scanners with the image quality of high-field scanners. Yet, existing methods remain prone to anatomical hallucinations, as uniform processing leaves difficult brain regions insufficiently examined and scarce paired data limit their learning of how tissue contrast and anatomical visibility change across field strengths. To address these challenges, we propose UniField++, a two-agent framework that unifies enhancement tasks across multiple field-strength transitions, including 64mT-to-3T and 3T-to-7T. Unified learning allows both the VLM-based planner and the flow-matching-based enhancer to draw on field-dependent image characteristics observed across tasks, rather than relying on a single transition. Trained with radiologists' annotations of hallucination-prone regions and corresponding correction plans, the planner predicts regional risk and formulates targeted restoration strategies. Guided by these plans, the enhancer performs loop reasoning along the flow-matching trajectory, repeatedly processing high-risk regions for additional refinement. Together, cross-transition learning and risk-guided refinement support anatomically faithful enhancement across field strengths. Across the evaluated tasks, UniField++ improves PSNR by an average of 2.74 dB and SSIM by 14.05 percentage points over comparison methods, with corresponding gains of 3.97 dB and 13.92 percentage points over the ablation baseline. It also maintains enhancement quality on an external cohort with an unseen field strength and improves downstream whole-brain segmentation Macro Dice by an average of 0.1457 over the original low-field images. Code is available at https://github.com/CUHK-AIM-Group/UniField_plusplus.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1: Overview of UniField++. Our framework unifies enhancement tasks across various types of field strengths. And UniField++ primarily comprises a VLM-based planner that simulates the radiologists’ planning process for enhancement, and a flow-matching-based enhancer that executes the enhancement according to the plan.
Fig. 2: Schematic diagram of UniField++. Our framework mainly consists of two parts: (a) In the construction of Radiologist-Informed Enhancement Planner , (1) for the Hallucination Annotating, radiologists identify hallucinations in MRI field strength enhancement and provide restoration plans; (2) for the Hallucination Learning, a Vision-Language Model (VLM) based planner is fine-tuned to predict hallucinations and generate the restoration plans; (b) In the Unified Agentic Enhancement with Loop Reasoning , guided by the plans provided by the VLM, a flow-matching based enhancer containing the loop transformer is utilized for MRI field strength enhancement.
Task
Dataset
Modalities
Registered
Total
Train
Test
64mT-to-3T
ULF-EnC [ 5 ]
T1, T2, FLAIR
Yes
50
40
10
Leiden [ 37 ]
T1, T2, FLAIR
No
10
8
2
KCL [ 7 ]
T1, T2
No
23
18
5
3T-to-7T
UNC [ 8 ]
T1, T2
Yes
10
8
2
BNU [ 9 ]
T1, T2
No
20
16
4
50mT-to-3T
BTH
T1, T2, FLAIR
Yes
30
0
30
TABLE I: Dataset overview. Three public datasets for 64mT-to-3T, two for 3T-to-7T, and a private 50mT-to-3T dataset are used.
Fig. 3: Qualitative comparison on the internal dataset for 64mT-to-3T and 3T-to-7T across multiple modalities. The value in the lower-right corner of each image is the mean absolute error (MAE).
Methods
T1
T2
FLAIR
NRMSE ↓
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
NRMSE ↓
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
NRMSE ↓
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
MO-U-NET (HBM’25)
11.4
18.98
52.9
0.278
9.5
20.58
59.2
0.233
10.9
19.32
53.3
0.249
MSFA (MICCAI’24)
11.3
19.05
67.9
0.255
9.9
20.27
71.6
0.220
10.9
19.31
65.6
0.238
LowGAN (Radiology’25)
12.8
18.03
66.6
0.195
11.4
18.98
65.8
0.195
14.1
17.02
63.2
0.195
FlashVSR (CVPR’26)
12.1
18.41
63.4
0.298
12.0
18.54
66.3
0.235
15.1
16.61
60.6
0.300
FCVSR (TMM’26)
14.1
17.16
61.7
0.258
11.9
18.63
64.9
0.217
16.6
15.67
55.6
0.258
TABLE II: 64mT-to-3T comparison for T1, T2, and FLAIR. NRMSE and SSIM are in %, PSNR in dB, and LPIPS is unitless. Bold and underlined values indicate the best and second-best results.
Methods
MO-U-NET HBM ’25
MSFA MICCAI ’24
LowGAN Radiology ’25
FlashVSR CVPR ’26
FCVSR TMM ’26
UniField MICCAI ’26
UniField++ (Ours)
T1
NRMSE ↓
11.9
10.5
15.4
11.8
14.2
9.9
8.2
PSNR ↑
18.51
19.66
16.26
18.63
16.97
20.12
21.79
SSIM ↑
60.8
66.8
54.0
63.0
56.8
66.1
77.1
LPIPS ↓
0.277
0.234
0.248
0.228
0.264
0.207
0.198
T2
TABLE III: 3T-to-7T comparison for T1 and T2. Bold and underlined values indicate the best and second-best results.
Fig. 4: Qualitative comparison on the external dataset for the 50mT-to-3T task.
Methods
T1
T2
FLAIR
NRMSE ↓
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
NRMSE ↓
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
NRMSE ↓
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
MO-U-NET (HBM’25)
9.7
20.32
76.6
0.212
9.0
21.11
79.6
0.184
12.5
18.10
74.2
0.227
MSFA (MICCAI’24)
10.1
20.05
77.2
0.174
9.2
20.87
79.3
0.174
13.9
17.21
74.2
0.215
LowGAN (Radiology’25)
10.0
20.12
73.6
0.174
11.5
18.84
72.6
0.180
13.7
17.28
70.8
0.191
FlashVSR (CVPR’26)
9.2
20.88
75.7
0.249
8.8
21.32
78.1
0.176
12.2
18.34
74.6
0.232
FCVSR (TMM’26)
10.5
19.75
75.7
0.190
9.3
20.77
78.8
0.158
11.7
18.69
75.1
0.179
TABLE IV: External quantitative results on the 50mT-to-3T task. Bold and underlined values denote the best and second-best results, respectively; underlining is omitted when the best result is tied.
Fig. 5: Qualitative ablation of components in UAELR. Column labels: P, plan; A, atlas; L, loop; F, decoder fine-tuning. Red boxes and zoom-ins highlight the changes introduced by each component.
Setting
Region F1 ↑
Issue F1 ↑
Plan F1 ↑
Semantic ↑
W/o HL
0.6546
0.3986
0.6833
0.3548
With HL
0.8511
0.6383
0.8313
0.5213
TABLE V: Hallucination learning (HL) ablation.
Planner
Enhancer
Hyper- parameters
Setting
T1
T2
FLAIR
Plan
Atlas
Loop
Finetune decoder
NRMSE ↓
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
NRMSE ↓
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
NRMSE ↓
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
×
×
×
×
–
–
13.1
17.77
68.1
0.252
14.7
16.82
60.9
0.268
14.4
16.99
63.5
0.282
✓
×
×
×
–
–
10.9
19.38
71.2
0.194
8.7
21.26
71.6
0.171
10.0
20.05
67.0
0.212
✓
✓
×
×
\Block 3-1 λrisk
1
10.9
19.40
72.9
0.190
9.0
21.03
74.1
0.163
10.1
19.95
69.4
0.206
5
10.7
19.47
72.7
0.184
8.8
21.21
74.1
0.164
9.6
20.40
70.9
0.197
10
10.9
19.31
70.0
0.193
8.7
21.25
73.1
0.171
10.8
19.45
66.9
0.210
TABLE VI: Ablation results on the 64mT-to-3T task. NRMSE and SSIM are in %, PSNR in dB, and LPIPS is unitless. Bold and underlined values indicate the best and second-best results, respectively; underlining is omitted when the best result is tied. λrisk is the risk weight in Eq. ( 9 ); Loop block number specifies the blocks used for cyclic inference in the 30-block backbone.
Planner
Enhancer
Hyper- parameters
Setting
T1
T2
Plan
Atlas
Loop
Finetune decoder
NRMSE ↓
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
NRMSE ↓
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
LPIPS ↓
×
×
×
×
–
–
12.4
18.22
60.7
0.261
10.5
19.66
62.7
0.231
✓
×
×
×
–
–
11.3
18.96
64.4
0.210
8.4
21.61
65.3
0.188
✓
✓
×
×
\Block 3-1 λrisk
1
10.0
20.05
67.9
0.206
8.3
21.69
68.5
0.178
5
10.2
19.92
67.0
0.198
7.5
22.48
71.9
0.173
10
9.6
20.49
68.7
0.200
8.1
21.87
70.7
0.178
TABLE VII: Ablation results on the 3T-to-7T task. Bold and underlined values indicate the best and second-best results, respectively; underlining is omitted when the best result is tied. λrisk is the risk weight in Eq. ( 9 ); Loop block number specifies the blocks used for cyclic inference in the 30-block backbone.
Task
Modality
ntest
Macro Dice ↑
Foreground Dice ↑
Macro IoU ↑
Volume Similarity ↑
(Input / Virtual)
(Input / Virtual)
(Input / Virtual)
(Input / Virtual)
\Block 3-164mT → 3T
T1
17
0.5366 / 0.7803
0.8573 / 0.9205
0.3921 / 0.6538
0.9315 / 0.9723
T2
17
0.7220 / 0.8350
0.9082 / 0.9404
0.5788 / 0.7226
0.9617 / 0.9874
FLAIR
12
0.4396 / 0.7793
0.8343 / 0.9317
0.3127 / 0.6486
0.8925 / 0.9828
\Block 2-13T → 7T
T1
6
0.8294 / 0.8412
0.9420 / 0.9468
0.7169 / 0.7333
0.9852 / 0.9898
T2
6
0.7747 / 0.7950
0.9302 / 0.9359
0.6446 / 0.6710
0.9723 / 0.9752
TABLE VIII: Downstream results of UniField++. Metrics are shown for input / virtual high-field MRI, using SynthSeg on real high-field MRI as the reference. ntest is the number of test volumes per modality.
Fig. 6: Qualitative downstream segmentation results. The numbers below the segmentation maps are Dice scores.
Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) field-strength enhancement holds immense value for both clinical diagnostics and advanced research. However, existing methods typically focus on isolated enhancement tasks, such as specific 64mT-to-3T or 3T-to-7T transitions using limited subject cohorts, thereby failing to exploit the shared degradation patterns inherent across different field strengths and severely restricting model generalization. To address this challenge, we propose \methodname, a unified framework integrating multiple modalities and enhancement tasks to mutually promote representation learning by exploiting these shared degradation characteristics. Specifically, our main contributions are threefold. Firstly, to overcome MRI data scarcity and capture continuous anatomical structures, \methodname departs from conventional methods that treat 3D MRI volumes as independent 2D slices. Instead, we directly exploit comprehensive 3D volumetric information by leveraging pre-trained 3D foundation models, thereby embedding generalized and robust structural representations to significantly boost enhancement performance. In addition, to mitigate the spectral bias of mainstream flow-matching models that often over-smooth high-frequency details, we explicitly incorporate the physical mechanisms of magnetic fields to introduce a Field-Aware Spectral Rectification Mechanism (FASRM), tailoring customized spectral corrections to distinct field strengths. Finally, to resolve the fundamental data bottleneck, we organize and publicly release a comprehensive paired multi-field MRI dataset, which is an order of magnitude larger than existing datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate our method's superiority over state-of-the-art approaches, achieving an average improvement of approximately 1.81 dB in PSNR and 9.47% in SSIM. Codes and datasets are available at: https://github.com/linyiyang98/UniField.
Yiyang Lin, Chenhui Wang, Zhihao Peng +1
Department of Electronic Engineering, the Chinese University of Hong Kong · The Institute of Science and Technology for Brain-inspired Intelligence, Fudan University
Ultra-low-field (ULF) MRI offers portable and low-cost imaging but suffers from poor image quality. To address this, we present our submission to the 2025 ULF Enhancement Challenge (ULF-EnC), where the goal is to synthesise high-field-like MRIs from 64 mT scans. Our pipeline enhances ULF MRI through a combination of anatomical conditioning and model ensembling. We first generate tissue segmentation priors using a Swin UNETR trained solely on challenge-provided data. These priors condition two independent enhancement networks - a CycleGAN and a transformer-based residual enhancement model (T-REX) - each trained to synthesise 3 T-like MRIs. Outputs from both models are combined using a weighted average. Our approach produces enhanced MRIs that were comparable to high-field scans both quantitatively and qualitatively.
James Grover, Andrew Phair, Michael Ferraro +1
Image X Institute, Sydney School of Health Sciences, Faculty of Medicine and Health, The University of Sydney
Super-resolution and quality enhancement of 1.5,T brain MRI are normally validated with image-fidelity metrics, although their purpose is to improve downstream analysis. We study whether enhancement improves tissue segmentation, and for which segmenters. We propose an unpaired, physics-guided training pipeline for a lightweight (≤2.5,M parameter) recurrent convolutional enhancer: a six-module stochastic 1.5,T degradation operator, a residual adversarial network that adds scanner-specific texture without moving anatomy, and a cycle-consistent objective with an anti-identity penalty that rules out the copy solution. We then train U-Net, Swin-UNet and wavelet token-mixing segmenters \citep{jeevan2023wavemix} from scratch on either raw or enhanced 1.5,T images of the same subjects, using identical labels and subject-level splits, for three enhancer variants and two datasets. On ABIDE (41 held-out subjects, FreeSurfer labels) enhancement significantly improves the wavelet segmenter (mean Dice +0.014, Wilcoxon p=3.5×10−5; CSF +0.018, grey matter +0.013), significantly degrades the U-Net (−0.008, p=5.1×10−4) and leaves Swin-UNet unchanged. On IXI, whose labels come from FSL-FAST, enhancement lowers Dice for all nine pairings, almost entirely through CSF; we trace this to spatially implausible CSF voxels in the labels that penalise smoother predictions. Enhancement of low-field MRI should therefore be validated per downstream model and against reliable labels.
Kavitha Viswanathan, Harsh Choudhary, Amit Sethi
Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai 400 076, India