Anisotropy correction of medical image data employing patch similarity

CT or MR image data is typically anisotropic. But, it is desirable to base image processing as well as diagnosis on isotropic image data. In this work, we propose a novel method for correcting anisotropy of 3D image data sets by employing the recurrence of small 2D patches across different scales. We base our method on previous work dealing with super-resolution of single natural 2D images, show the applicability of that approach also to medical images, and extend it to a 3D solution for anisotropy correction. Our results show that the image quality can be significantly improved. For clinical CT and MRI data, we present feedback from the clinical end user.