Breaking the Continuum: Discrete Distribution Learning for Structural MRI Reconstruction

Anatomical structures in MRI exhibit strong spatial priors, including well-defined boundaries, low inter-subject variability, and consistent topology. These properties naturally induce clustered patterns in the latent space, which are difficult to capture using conventional continuous generative priors that assume smooth manifold distributions. To address this limitation, we propose DiCoS (Discrete–Continuous Synthesis), a generative reconstruction framework that integrates discrete structural reasoning with continuous refinement. DiCoS models an anatomy-aware discrete distribution and generates diverse reconstructions in one coarse-to-fine pass through a Discrete Prior Network (DPN). A Dual-domain Balanced Scoring (DBS) mechanism adaptively evaluates candidates using both image-domain fidelity and k-space consistency. To further enhance realism, Micro Diffusion Cycles (MDC) perform efficient score-guided refinement to enhance texture realism without disturbing global topology. Experiments on the fastMRI knee and brain datasets demonstrate that DiCoS achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction quality with sharper boundaries and improved anatomical consistency. Beyond pixel metrics, segmentation-based evaluations further confirm superior structural overlap and semantic alignment, highlighting DiCoS's advantages in anatomy-aware reconstruction. Code and models will be released upon publication.