Recently, deep learning(DL) methods have been proposed for the low-dose computed tomography(LdCT) enhancement, and obtain good trade-off between computational efficiency and image quality. Most of them need large number of pre-collected ground-truth high-dose sinograms with less noise, and train the network in a supervised end-to-end manner. This may bring major limitations on these methods because the number of such low-dose high-dose training sinogram pairs would affect the network's capability and sometimes the ground-truth sinograms are hard to be obtained in large scale. Since large number of low-dose ones are relatively easy to obtain, it should be critical to make these sources play roles in network training in an unsupervised learning manner. To address this issue, we propose an unsupervised DL method for LdCT enhancement that incorporates unlabeled LdCT sinograms directly into the network training. The proposed method effectively considers the structure characteristics and noise distribution in the measured LdCT sinogram, and then learns the proper gradient of the LdCT sinogram in a pure unsupervised manner. Similar to the labeled ground-truth, the gradient information in an unlabeled LdCT sinogram can be used for sufficient network training. The experiments on the patient data show effectiveness of the proposed method.
Currently, the data-based DL approaches has achieved inspiring achievements to this issue. For example, @cite_2 first introduced CNN in CT images denoising task. To extract features more efficiently, he further used a encoder-decoder network instead @cite_14 . After that, @cite_8 introduced the perceptual loss in CT enhancement task, which measured the difference between low-dose high-dose CT image pairs in a high-level feature space to make them look more similar. Further, in order to preserve the detail information as well, @cite_11 combined the GAN and a low-level feature space measurement network named sharpness detection network, to decrease the blur effect.
@cite_8 @cite_14 @cite_11 @cite_2
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Increasing use of CT in modern medical practice has raised concerns over associated radiation dose. Reduction of radiation dose associated with CT can increase noise and artifacts, which can adversely affect diagnostic confidence. Denoising of low-dose CT images on the other hand can help improve diagnostic confidence, which however is a challenging problem due to its ill-posed nature, since one noisy image patch may correspond to many different output patches. In the past decade, machine learning based approaches have made quite impressive progress in this direction. However, most of those methods, including the recently popularized deep learning techniques, aim for minimizing mean-squared-error (MSE) between a denoised CT image and the ground truth, which results in losing important structural details due to over-smoothing, although the PSNR based performance measure looks great. In this work, we introduce a new perceptual similarity measure as the objective function for a deep convolutional neural network to facilitate CT image denoising. Instead of directly computing MSE for pixel-to-pixel intensity loss, we compare the perceptual features of a denoised output against those of the ground truth in a feature space. Therefore, our proposed method is capable of not only reducing the image noise levels, but also keeping the critical structural information at the same time. Promising results have been obtained in our experiments with a large number of CT images. Given the potential risk of X-ray radiation to the patient, low-dose CT has attracted a considerable interest in the medical imaging field. Currently, the main stream low-dose CT methods include vendor-specific sinogram domain filtration and iterative reconstruction algorithms, but they need to access raw data, whose formats are not transparent to most users. Due to the difficulty of modeling the statistical characteristics in the image domain, the existing methods for directly processing reconstructed images cannot eliminate image noise very well while keeping structural details. Inspired by the idea of deep learning, here we combine the autoencoder, deconvolution network, and shortcut connections into the residual encoder–decoder convolutional neural network (RED-CNN) for low-dose CT imaging. After patch-based training, the proposed RED-CNN achieves a competitive performance relative to the-state-of-art methods in both simulated and clinical cases. Especially, our method has been favorably evaluated in terms of noise suppression, structural preservation, and lesion detection. Low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) has offered tremendous benefits in radiation-restricted applications, but the quantum noise as resulted by the insufficient number of photons could potentially harm the diagnostic performance. Current image-based denoising methods tend to produce a blur effect on the final reconstructed results especially in high noise levels. In this paper, a deep learning-based approach was proposed to mitigate this problem. An adversarially trained network and a sharpness detection network were trained to guide the training process. Experiments on both simulated and real dataset show that the results of the proposed method have very small resolution loss and achieves better performance relative to state-of-the-art methods both quantitatively and visually. In order to reduce the potential radiation risk, low-dose CT has attracted more and more attention. However, simply lowering the radiation dose will significantly degrade the imaging quality. In this paper, we propose a noise reduction method for low-dose CT via deep learning without accessing the original projection data. An architecture of deep convolutional neural network was considered to map the low-dose CT images into its corresponding normal-dose CT images patch by patch. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate a state-the-art performance of the proposed method.