Journal of Information Systems and Informatics
Vol 8 No 2 (2026): April

Reinforcement Learning–Guided Hyperparameter Tuning for U-Net-Based Super-Resolution of Brain MRI Under Synthetic Degradation

Suci Ramadini (Sriwijaya University)
Julian Supardi (Sriwijaya University)



Article Info

Publish Date
12 Apr 2026

Abstract

Low-resolution magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) may reduce visibility of fine anatomical details, motivating computational super-resolution (SR) to enhance perceived image quality. This study proposes an SR pipeline for 2D brain MRI images using a U‑Net baseline model and a reinforcement learning (RL) agent to automate hyperparameter tuning. Because the selected public dataset does not provide paired low-resolution/high-resolution (LR–HR) images, LR inputs are generated synthetically using a controlled degradation process (blur–downsample–upsample–noise), with deterministic degradation for validation and testing to ensure stable evaluation. The baseline U‑Net is trained using an L1 objective (optionally mixed with differentiable SSIM loss), AdamW optimizer, and ReduceLROnPlateau scheduler guided by validation PSNR. A Double Deep Q‑Network (Double DQN) agent then selects discrete action combinations of learning rate and SSIM-weighted loss mixing to fine-tune the baseline. For the held-out test set (n=60), the baseline improves degraded inputs from 27.04±3.21 dB to 30.10±3.59 dB PSNR and from 0.706±0.132 to 0.875±0.064 SSIM, respectively. RL fine-tuning yields a modest additional PSNR gain to 30.20±3.58 dB and SSIM remains comparable at 0.873±0.066. The paired statistical tests confirm that the PSNR improvement is significant (p<0.01), while changes in SSIM are not statistically significant, suggesting that for the tested synthetic degradation setting RL can provide reliable but incremental refinement when the baseline is already strong.

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Journal Info

Abbrev

isi

Publisher

Subject

Computer Science & IT

Description

Journal-ISI is a scientific article journal that is the result of ideas, great and original thoughts about the latest research and technological developments covering the fields of information systems, information technology, informatics engineering, and computer science, and industrial engineering ...