Dose reduction in computed tomography (CT) is essential for decreasing radiation risk in clinical applications. Iterative reconstruction is one of the most promising ways to compensate for the increased noise due to reduction of photon flux. Rather than most existing prior-driven algorithms that benefit from manually designed prior functions or supervised learning schemes, in this work we integrate the data-consistency as a conditional term into the iterative generative model for low-dose CT. At the stage of prior learning, the gradient of data density is directly learned from normal-dose CT images as a prior. Then at the iterative reconstruction stage, the stochastic gradient descent is employed to update the trained prior with annealed and conditional schemes. The distance between the reconstructed image and the manifold is minimized along with data fidelity during reconstruction. Experimental comparisons demonstrated the noise reduction and detail preservation abilities of the proposed method.
Low Dose Computed Tomography suffers from a high amount of noise and/or undersampling artefacts in the reconstructed image. In the current article, a Deep Learning technique is exploited as a regularization term for the iterative reconstruction method SIRT. While SIRT minimizes the error in the sinogram space, the proposed regularization model additionally steers intermediate SIRT reconstructions towards the desired output. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the superior outcomes of the proposed method compared to the state of the art techniques. Comparing the forward projection of the reconstr…
Maastricht University Medical Centre+（马斯特里赫特大学医学中心+）
Radiomics is an active area of research focusing on high throughput feature extraction from medical images with a wide array of applications in clinical practice, such as clinical decision support in oncology. However, noise in low dose computed tomography (CT) scans can impair the accurate extraction of radiomic features. In this article, we investigate the possibility of using deep learning generative models to improve the performance of radiomics from low dose CTs. We used two datasets of low dose CT scans -NSCLC Radiogenomics and LIDC-IDRI - as test datasets for two tasks - pre-treatment s…
The University of Tokyo Hospital（东京大学医学部附属医院）；Center for Frontier Medical Engineering, Chiba University（千叶大学前沿医疗工程中心）；Division of Radiology and Biomedical Engineering, Graduate School of Medicine, The University of Tokyo（东京大学医学研究生院放射科与生物医学工程学系）
Ultra sparse-view computed tomography (CT) algorithms can reduce radiation exposure of patients, but those algorithms lack an explicit cycle consistency loss minimization and an explicit log-likelihood maximization in testing. Here, we propose X2CT-FLOW for the maximum a posteriori (MAP) reconstruction of a three-dimensional (3D) chest CT image from a single or a few two-dimensional (2D) projection images using a progressive flow-based deep generative model, especially for ultra low-dose protocols. The MAP reconstruction can simultaneously optimize the cycle consistency loss and the log-likeli…
PFCM: Poisson flow consistency models for low-dose CT image denoising
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；KTH Royal Institute of Technology（瑞典皇家理工学院）；Karolinska University Hospital（卡罗林斯卡大学医院）；GE HealthCare（GE医疗）；Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute（伦斯勒理工学院）
Northeastern University（东北大学）；Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）；Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute（伦斯勒理工学院）
Due to the widespread use of positron emission tomography (PET) in clinical practice, the potential risk of PET-associated radiation dose to patients needs to be minimized. However, with the reduction in the radiation dose, the resultant images may suffer from noise and artifacts that compromise diagnostic performance. In this paper, we propose a parameter-transferred Wasserstein generative adversarial network (PT-WGAN) for low-dose PET image denoising. The contributions of this paper are twofold: i) a PT-WGAN framework is designed to denoise low-dose PET images without compromising structural…
University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；University of Michigan - Shanghai Jiao Tong University Joint Institute（上海交通大学密西根学院）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）
Obtaining accurate and reliable images from low-dose computed tomography (CT) is challenging. Regression convolutional neural network (CNN) models that are learned from training data are increasingly gaining attention in low-dose CT reconstruction. This paper modifies the architecture of an iterative regression CNN, BCD-Net, for fast, stable, and accurate low-dose CT reconstruction, and presents the convergence property of the modified BCD-Net. Numerical results with phantom data show that applying faster numerical solvers to model-based image reconstruction (MBIR) modules of BCD-Net leads to …
Computer-Aided-Diagnosis (CADx) systems assist radiologists with identifying and classifying potentially malignant pulmonary nodules on chest CT scans using morphology and texture-based (radiomic) features. However, radiomic features are sensitive to differences in acquisitions due to variations in dose levels and slice thickness. This study investigates the feasibility of generating a normalized scan from heterogeneous CT scans as input. We obtained projection data from 40 low-dose chest CT scans, simulating acquisitions at 10%, 25% and 50% dose and reconstructing the scans at 1.0mm and 2.0mm…
Maastricht University Medical Centre+（马斯特里赫特大学医学中心+）；Radboud University Medical Center（拉德堡德大学医学中心）
Radiomics is an active area of research in medical image analysis, the low reproducibility of radiomics has limited its applicability to clinical practice. This issue is especially prominent when radiomic features are calculated from noisy images, such as low dose computed tomography (CT) scans. In this article, we investigate the possibility of improving the reproducibility of radiomic features calculated on noisy CTs by using generative models for denoising.One traditional denoising method - non-local means - and two generative models - encoder-decoder networks (EDN) and conditional generati…
Low dose X-ray computed tomography (LDCT) is desirable for reduced patient dose. This work develops image reconstruction methods with deep learning (DL) regularization for LDCT. Our methods are based on unrolling of proximal forward-backward splitting (PFBS) framework with data-driven image regularization via deep neural networks. In contrast with PFBS-IR that utilizes standard data fidelity updates via iterative reconstruction (IR) method, PFBS-AIR involves preconditioned data fidelity updates that fuse analytical reconstruction (AR) method and IR in a synergistic way, I.e. fused analytical a…
The image noise level and resolution of SPECT images are relatively poor attributed to the limited number of detected counts and various physical degradation factors during acquisitions. This study aims to apply and evaluate the use of generative adversarial network (GAN) method in static SPECT image denoising. A population of 4D extended cardiac-torso (XCAT) phantoms were used to simulate 10 male and female patients with different organ sizes and activity uptakes. An analytical projector was applied to simulate 120 projections from right anterior oblique to left posterior oblique positions wi…
Fudan University（复旦大学）；Sichuan University（四川大学）；Shanghai Center for Brain Science and Brain-inspired Technology（上海脑科学与类脑研究中心）
LDCT has drawn major attention in the medical imaging field due to the potential health risks of CT-associated X-ray radiation to patients. Reducing the radiation dose, however, decreases the quality of the reconstructed images, which consequently compromises the diagnostic performance. Various deep learning techniques have been introduced to improve the image quality of LDCT images through denoising. GANs-based denoising methods usually leverage an additional classification network, i.e. discriminator, to learn the most discriminate difference between the denoised and normal-dose images and, …
Low-dose computed tomography (CT) plays a significant role in reducing the radiation risk in clinical applications. However, lowering the radiation dose will significantly degrade the image quality. With the rapid development and wide application of deep learning, it has brought new directions for the development of low-dose CT imaging algorithms. Therefore, we propose a fully unsupervised one sample diffusion model (OSDM)in projection domain for low-dose CT reconstruction. To extract sufficient prior information from single sample, the Hankel matrix formulation is employed. Besides, the penal…
Electron density maps must be accurately estimated to achieve valid dose calculation in MR-only radiotherapy. The goal of this study is to assess whether two deep learning models, the conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN) and the cycle-consistent generative adversarial network (cycleGAN), can generate accurate abdominal synthetic CT (sCT) images from 0.35T MR images for MR-only liver radiotherapy. A retrospective study was performed using CT images and 0.35T MR images of 12 patients with liver (n=8) and non-liver abdominal (n=4) cancer. CT images were deformably registered to the c…
Computed tomography (CT) uses X-ray measurements taken from sensors around the body to generate tomographic images of the human body. Conventional reconstruction algorithms can be used if the X-ray data are adequately sampled and of high quality; however, concerns such as reducing dose to the patient, or geometric limitations on data acquisition, may result in low quality or incomplete data. Images reconstructed from these data using conventional methods are of poor quality, due to noise and other artifacts. The aim of this study is to train a single neural network to reconstruct high-quality …
Self-Supervised Training For Low Dose CT Reconstruction
Electronics and Communication Engineering Department, Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey（电子与通信工程系，伊斯坦布尔技术大学）；Electrical and Electronics Engineering Department, Istanbul University, Istanbul, Turkey（电气与电子工程系，伊斯坦布尔大学）
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute（伦斯勒理工学院）；Massachusetts General Hospital（麻省总医院）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）；University of Massachusetts Lowell（马萨诸塞大学洛厄尔分校）
By the ALARA (As Low As Reasonably Achievable) principle, ultra-low-dose CT reconstruction is a holy grail to minimize cancer risks and genetic damages, especially for children. With the development of medical CT technologies, the iterative algorithms are widely used to reconstruct decent CT images from a low-dose scan. Recently, artificial intelligence (AI) techniques have shown a great promise in further reducing CT radiation dose to the next level. In this paper, we demonstrate that AI-powered CT reconstruction offers diagnostic image quality at an ultra-low-dose level comparable to that of…
Enhancing Low Dose Computed Tomography Images Using Consistency Training Techniques
University of Kentucky（肯塔基大学）；Institute for Biomedical Informatics（生物医学信息学研究所）；Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute（伦斯勒理工学院）；University of Alabama at Birmingham（阿拉巴马大学伯明翰分校）
PPFM: Image denoising in photon-counting CT using single-step posterior sampling Poisson flow generative models
KTH Royal Institute of Technology（皇家理工学院）；Karolinska University Hospital（卡罗林斯卡大学医院）；University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health（威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校医学与公共卫生学院）；GE HealthCare（GE医疗）；Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute（伦斯勒理工学院）
Recent years have witnessed growing interest in machine learning-based models and techniques for low-dose X-ray CT (LDCT) imaging tasks. The methods can typically be categorized into supervised learning methods and unsupervised or model-based learning methods. Supervised learning methods have recently shown success in image restoration tasks. However, they often rely on large training sets. Model-based learning methods such as dictionary or transform learning do not require large or paired training sets and often have good generalization properties, since they learn general properties of CT im…
Synchrotron-based X-ray computed tomography is widely used for investigating inner structures of specimens at high spatial resolutions. However, potential beam damage to samples often limits the X-ray exposure during tomography experiments. Proposed strategies for eliminating beam damage also decrease reconstruction quality. Here we present a deep learning-based method to enhance low-dose tomography reconstruction via a hybrid-dose acquisition strategy composed of extremely sparse-view normal-dose projections and full-view low-dose projections. Corresponding image pairs are extracted from low-…
MD-Dose: A diffusion model based on the Mamba for radiation dose prediction
Chengdu Institute of Computer Application, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院成都计算机应用研究所）；School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Sichuan University West China Hospital（四川大学华西医院）；Radiophysical Technology Center, Cancer Center, West China Hospital, Sichuan University（四川大学华西医院肿瘤中心放射物理技术中心）
The Ohio State University College of Medicine（俄亥俄州立大学医学院）
Consistency and duplicability in Computed Tomography (CT) output is essential to quantitative imaging for lung cancer detection and monitoring. This study of CT-detected lung nodules investigated the reproducibility of volume-, density-, and texture-based features (outcome variables) over routine ranges of radiation-dose, reconstruction kernel, and slice thickness. CT raw data of 23 nodules were reconstructed using 320 acquisition/reconstruction conditions (combinations of 4 doses, 10 kernels, and 8 thicknesses). Scans at 12.5%, 25%, and 50% of protocol dose were simulated; reduced-dose and fu…
As the medical usage of computed tomography (CT) continues to grow, the radiation dose should remain at a low level to reduce the health risks. Therefore, there is an increasing need for algorithms that can reconstruct high-quality images from low-dose scans. In this regard, most of the recent studies have focused on iterative reconstruction algorithms, and little attention has been paid to restoration of the projection measurements, i.e., the sinogram. In this paper, we propose a novel sinogram interpolation algorithm. The proposed algorithm exploits the self-similarity and smoothness of the …
Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg（埃尔朗根-纽伦堡大学）；Siemens Healthcare GmbH（西门子医疗有限公司）
Denoising of clinical CT images is an active area for deep learning research. Current clinically approved methods use iterative reconstruction methods to reduce the noise in CT images. Iterative reconstruction techniques require multiple forward and backward projections, which are time-consuming and computationally expensive. Recently, deep learning methods have been successfully used to denoise CT images. However, conventional deep learning methods suffer from the 'black box' problem. They have low accountability, which is necessary for use in clinical imaging situations. In this paper, we us…
Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU)（埃尔朗根-纽伦堡弗里德里希-亚历山大大学）；Siemens Healthcare GmbH（西门子医疗有限公司）
Deep neural networks have shown great success in low dose CT denoising. However, most of these deep neural networks have several hundred thousand trainable parameters. This, combined with the inherent non-linearity of the neural network, makes the deep neural network diffcult to understand with low accountability. In this study we introduce JBFnet, a neural network for low dose CT denoising. The architecture of JBFnet implements iterative bilateral filtering. The filter functions of the Joint Bilateral Filter (JBF) are learned via shallow convolutional networks. The guidance image is estimated…
Clinical SPECT-MPI images of 345 patients acquired from a dedicated cardiac SPECT in list-mode format were retrospectively employed to predict normal-dose images from low-dose data at the half, quarter, and one-eighth-dose levels. A generative adversarial network was implemented to predict non-gated normal-dose images in the projection space at the different reduced dose levels. Established metrics including the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), root mean squared error (RMSE), and structural similarity index metrics (SSIM) in addition to Pearson correlation coefficient analysis and derived pa…
Recently, a number of approaches to low-dose computed tomography (CT) have been developed and deployed in commercialized CT scanners. Tube current reduction is perhaps the most actively explored technology with advanced image reconstruction algorithms. Sparse data sampling is another viable option to the low-dose CT, and sparse-view CT has been particularly of interest among the researchers in CT community. Since analytic image reconstruction algorithms would lead to severe image artifacts, various iterative algorithms have been developed for reconstructing images from sparsely view-sampled pr…
University of Michigan - Shanghai Jiao Tong University Joint Institute（密歇根大学-上海交通大学联合学院）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；University of Hawai’i at Manoa（夏威夷大学马诺阿分校）
This paper applies the recent fast iterative neural network framework, Momentum-Net, using appropriate models to low-dose X-ray computed tomography (LDCT) image reconstruction. At each layer of the proposed Momentum-Net, the model-based image reconstruction module solves the majorized penalized weighted least-square problem, and the image refining module uses a four-layer convolutional neural network (CNN). Experimental results with the NIH AAPM-Mayo Clinic Low Dose CT Grand Challenge dataset show that the proposed Momentum-Net architecture significantly improves image reconstruction accuracy,…
Low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) scans, which can effectively alleviate the radiation problem, will degrade the imaging quality. In this paper, we propose a novel LDCT reconstruction network that unrolls the iterative scheme and performs in both image and manifold spaces. Because patch manifolds of medical images have low-dimensional structures, we can build graphs from the manifolds. Then, we simultaneously leverage the spatial convolution to extract the local pixel-level features from the images and incorporate the graph convolution to analyze the nonlocal topological features in manifold…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Binjiang Institute of Zhejiang University（浙江大学滨江研究院）；Hangzhou Universal Medical Imaging Diagnostic Center（杭州全景医学影像诊断中心）
18F-fluorodeoxyglucose (18F-FDG) Positron Emission Tomography (PET) imaging usually needs a full-dose radioactive tracer to obtain satisfactory diagnostic results, which raises concerns about the potential health risks of radiation exposure, especially for pediatric patients. Reconstructing the low-dose PET (L-PET) images to the high-quality full-dose PET (F-PET) ones is an effective way that both reduces the radiation exposure and remains diagnostic accuracy. In this paper, we propose a resource-efficient deep learning framework for L-PET reconstruction and analysis, referred to as transGAN-S…
Low-dose CT (LDCT) imaging is desirable in many clinical applications to reduce X-ray radiation dose to patients. Inspired by deep learning (DL), a recent promising direction of model-based iterative reconstruction (MBIR) methods for LDCT is via optimization-unrolling DL-regularized image reconstruction, where pre-defined image prior is replaced by learnable data-adaptive prior. However, LDCT is clinically multilevel, since clinical scans have different noise levels that depend of scanning site, patient size, and clinical task. Therefore, this work aims to develop an adaptive-hyper-parameter D…
A deep dictionary network-based foundation model for ultra-low-dose CT denoising
Yanshan University（燕山大学）；Capital Medical University（首都医科大学）；Beijing Friendship Hospital（北京友谊医院）；Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）；Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR)（新加坡科技研究局）
GAN-Based Architecture for Low-dose Computed Tomography Imaging Denoising
College of Life Science and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学生命科学技术学院）；New York University Shanghai（上海纽约大学）；School of Life Sciences and Biotechnology, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学生命科学技术学院）
Multibranch Generative Models for Multichannel Imaging with an Application to PET/CT Synergistic Reconstruction
Univ. Brest, LaTIM, INSERM, UMR 1101（布雷斯特大学、LaTIM研究所、法国国家健康与医学研究院、UMR 1101联合研究单位）；Nuclear Medicine Department, Poitiers University Hospital（普瓦捷大学医院核医学科）
State-of-the-art methods for retinal vessel segmentation mainly rely on manually labeled vessels as the ground truth for supervised training. The quality of manual labels plays an essential role in the segmentation accuracy, while in practice it could vary a lot and in turn could substantially mislead the training process and limit the segmentation accuracy. This paper aims to "purify" any comprehensive training set, which consists of data annotated by various observers, via refining low-quality manual labels in the dataset. To this end, we have developed a novel label refinement method based …
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Hokkaido University（北海道大学）；Global Institution for Collaborative Research and Education (GI-CoRE)（全球合作研究与教育机构（GI-CoRE））
This paper presents a dictionary learning-based method with region-specific image patches to maximize the utility of the powerful sparse data processing technique for CT image reconstruction. Considering heterogeneous distributions of image features and noise in CT, region-specific customization of dictionaries is utilized in iterative reconstruction. Thoracic CT images are partitioned into several regions according to their structural and noise characteristics. Dictionaries specific to each region are then learned from the segmented thoracic CT images and applied to subsequent image reconstru…
University of Leeds（利兹大学）；University of Milan-Bicocca（米兰比可卡大学）
Reconstructing images from downsampled and noisy measurements, such as MRI and low dose Computed Tomography (CT), is a mathematically ill-posed inverse problem. We propose an easy-to-use reconstruction method based on Expectation Propagation (EP) techniques. We incorporate the Monte Carlo (MC) method, Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), and Alternating Direction Method of Multiplier (ADMM) algorithm into EP method to address the intractability issue encountered in EP. We demonstrate the approach on complex Bayesian models for image reconstruction. Our technique is applied to images from Gamma-cam…
University of Dundee（邓迪大学）；University Hospital Poitiers（普瓦捷大学医院）
Objective. Dual-energy computed tomography (DECT) has the potential to improve contrast, reduce artifacts and the ability to perform material decomposition in advanced imaging applications. The increased number or measurements results with a higher radiation dose and it is therefore essential to reduce either number of projections per energy or the source X-ray intensity, but this makes tomographic reconstruction more ill-posed. Approach. We developed the multi-channel convolutional analysis operator learning (MCAOL) method to exploit common spatial features within attenuation images at differ…
University of Oulu（奥卢大学）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）；Elekta（医科达）；KTH – Royal Institute of Technology（瑞典皇家理工学院）；DeepMind
Model-based learned iterative reconstruction methods have recently been shown to outperform classical reconstruction algorithms. Applicability of these methods to large scale inverse problems is however limited by the available memory for training and extensive training times, the latter due to computationally expensive forward models. As a possible solution to these restrictions we propose a multi-scale learned iterative reconstruction scheme that computes iterates on discretisations of increasing resolution. This procedure does not only reduce memory requirements, it also considerably speeds…
