  In this work, we investigate the value of uncertainty modeling in 3D
super-resolution with convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Deep learning has
shown success in a plethora of medical image transformation problems, such as
super-resolution (SR) and image synthesis. However, the highly ill-posed nature
of such problems results in inevitable ambiguity in the learning of networks.
We propose to account for intrinsic uncertainty through a per-patch
heteroscedastic noise model and for parameter uncertainty through approximate
Bayesian inference in the form of variational dropout. We show that the
combined benefits of both lead to the state-of-the-art performance SR of
diffusion MR brain images in terms of errors compared to ground truth. We
further show that the reduced error scores produce tangible benefits in
downstream tractography. In addition, the probabilistic nature of the methods
naturally confers a mechanism to quantify uncertainty over the super-resolved
output. We demonstrate through experiments on both healthy and pathological
brains the potential utility of such an uncertainty measure in the risk
assessment of the super-resolved images for subsequent clinical use.
