Low dose computed tomography (LDCT) has attracted more and more attention in routine clinical diagnosis assessment, therapy planning, etc., which can reduce the dose of X-ray radiation to patients. However, the noise caused by low X-ray exposure degrades the CT image quality and then affects clinical diagnosis accuracy. In this paper, we train a transformer-based neural network to enhance the final CT image quality. To be specific, we first decompose the noisy LDCT image into two parts: high-frequency (HF) and low-frequency (LF) compositions. Then, we extract content features (X_{L_c}) and latent texture features (X_{L_t}) from the LF part, as well as HF embeddings (X_{H_f}) from the HF part. Further, we feed X_{L_t} and X_{H_f} into a modified transformer with three encoders and decoders to obtain well-refined HF texture features. After that, we combine these well-refined HF texture features with the pre-extracted X_{L_c} to encourage the restoration of high-quality LDCT images with the assistance of piecewise reconstruction. Extensive experiments on Mayo LDCT dataset show that our method produces superior results and outperforms other methods.
Ghost imaging has recently been successfully achieved in the X-ray regime; due to the penetrating power of X-rays this immediately opens up the possibility of X-ray ghost tomography. No research into this topic currently exists in the literature. Here we present adaptations of conventional tomography techniques to this new ghost imaging scheme. Several numerical implementations for tomography through X-ray ghost imaging are considered. Specific attention is paid to schemes for denoising of the resulting tomographic reconstruction, issues related to dose fractionation, and considerations regard…
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-…
National Institute for Mathematical Sciences（国家数学科学研究所）；Yonsei University（延世大学）
This paper describes the mathematical structure of the ill-posed nonlinear inverse problem of low-dose dental cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) and explains the advantages of a deep learning-based approach to the reconstruction of computed tomography images over conventional regularization methods. This paper explains the underlying reasons why dental CBCT is more ill-posed than standard computed tomography. Despite this severe ill-posedness, the demand for dental CBCT systems is rapidly growing because of their cost competitiveness and low radiation dose. We then describe the limitations o…
Image reconstruction from computed tomography (CT) measurement is a challenging statistical inverse problem since a high-dimensional conditional distribution needs to be estimated. Based on training data obtained from high-quality reconstructions, we aim to learn a conditional density of images from noisy low-dose CT measurements. To tackle this problem, we propose a hybrid conditional normalizing flow, which integrates the physical model by using the filtered back-projection as conditioner. We evaluate our approach on a low-dose CT benchmark and demonstrate superior performance in terms of st…
Sichuan University（四川大学）；Fudan University（复旦大学）；Shanghai Center for Brain Science and Brain-Inspired Technology（上海脑科学与类脑研究中心）；Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute（伦斯勒理工学院）
Since 2016, deep learning (DL) has advanced tomographic imaging with remarkable successes, especially in low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) imaging. Despite being driven by big data, the LDCT denoising and pure end-to-end reconstruction networks often suffer from the black box nature and major issues such as instabilities, which is a major barrier to apply deep learning methods in low-dose CT applications. An emerging trend is to integrate imaging physics and model into deep networks, enabling a hybridization of physics/model-based and data-driven elements. %This type of hybrid methods has be…
Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur（印度理工学院卡拉格布尔分校）
The resurgence of deep neural networks has created an alternative pathway for low-dose computed tomography denoising by learning a nonlinear transformation function between low-dose CT (LDCT) and normal-dose CT (NDCT) image pairs. However, those paired LDCT and NDCT images are rarely available in the clinical environment, making deep neural network deployment infeasible. This study proposes a novel method for self-supervised low-dose CT denoising to alleviate the requirement of paired LDCT and NDCT images. Specifically, we have trained an invertible neural network to minimize the pixel-based m…
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）；Niskayuna High School（尼斯卡尤纳高中）
Cancer patients have a higher risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) mortality than the general population. Low dose computed tomography (LDCT) for lung cancer screening offers an opportunity for simultaneous CVD risk estimation in at-risk patients. Our deep learning CVD risk prediction model, trained with 30,286 LDCTs from the National Lung Cancer Screening Trial, achieved an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.871 on a separate test set of 2,085 subjects and identified patients with high CVD mortality risks (AUC of 0.768). We validated our model against ECG-gated cardiac CT based markers, includin…
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Istanbul Technical University（伊斯坦布尔理工大学）
In this paper, we introduced a novel deep learning-based reconstruction technique for low-dose CT imaging using 3 dimensional convolutions to include the sagittal information unlike the existing 2 dimensional networks which exploits correlation only in transverse plane. In the proposed reconstruction technique, sparse and noisy sinograms are back-projected to the image domain with FBP operation, then the denoising process is applied with a U-Net like 3-dimensional network called 3D U-NetR. The proposed network is trained with synthetic and real chest CT images, and 2D U-Net is also trained wit…
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…
In a standard computed tomography (CT) image, pixels having the same Hounsfield Units (HU) can correspond to different materials and it is therefore challenging to differentiate and quantify materials. Dual-energy CT (DECT) is desirable to differentiate multiple materials, but DECT scanners are not widely available as single-energy CT (SECT) scanners. Here we purpose a deep learning approach to perform DECT imaging by using standard SECT data. We designed a predenoising and difference learning mechanism to generate DECT images from SECT data. The performance of the deep learning-based DECT app…
Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；The Second Affiliated Hospital of Harbin Medical University（哈尔滨医科大学附属第二医院）
Low-dose computed tomography (CT) allows the reduction of radiation risk in clinical applications at the expense of image quality, which deteriorates the diagnosis accuracy of radiologists. In this work, we present a High-Quality Imaging network (HQINet) for the CT image reconstruction from Low-dose computed tomography (CT) acquisitions. HQINet was a convolutional encoder-decoder architecture, where the encoder was used to extract spatial and temporal information from three contiguous slices while the decoder was used to recover the spacial information of the middle slice. We provide experimen…
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）
In the intention of minimizing excessive X-ray radiation administration to patients, low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) has become a distinct trend in radiology. However, while lowering the radiation dose reduces the risk to the patient, it also increases noise and artifacts, compromising image quality and clinical diagnosis. In most supervised learning methods, paired CT images are required, but such images are unlikely to be available in the clinic. We present a self-supervised learning model (Noise2Projection) that fully exploits the raw projection images to reduce noise and improve the qu…
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）
Ultrasound Computed Tomography (USCT) has great potential for 3D quantitative imaging of acoustic breast tissue properties. Typical devices include high-frequency transducers, which makes tomography techniques based on numerical wave propagation simulations computationally challenging, especially in 3D. Therefore, despite the finite-frequency nature of ultrasonic waves, ray-theoretical approaches to transmission tomography are still widely used. This work introduces finite-frequency traveltime tomography to medical ultrasound. In addition to being computationally tractable for 3D imaging at hi…
The penetration power of x-rays allows one to image large objects. For example, centimeter-sized specimens can be imaged with micron-level resolution using synchrotron sources. In this case, however, the limited beam diameter and detector size preclude the acquisition of the full sample in a single take, necessitating strategies for combining data from multiple regions. Object stitching involves the combination of local tomography data from overlapping regions, while projection stitching involves the collection of projections at multiple offset positions from the rotation axis followed by data…
Segmentation of bone regions allows for enhanced diagnostics, disease characterisation and treatment monitoring in CT imaging. In contrast enhanced whole-body scans accurate automatic segmentation is particularly difficult as low dose whole body protocols reduce image quality and make contrast enhanced regions more difficult to separate when relying on differences in pixel intensities. This paper outlines a U-net architecture with novel preprocessing techniques, based on the windowing of training data and the modification of sigmoid activation threshold selection to successfully segment bone-b…
Deep neural networks have received considerable attention in clinical imaging, particularly with respect to the reduction of radiation risk. Lowering the radiation dose by reducing the photon flux inevitably results in the degradation of the scanned image quality. Thus, researchers have sought to exploit deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) to map low-quality, low-dose images to higher-dose, higher-quality images thereby minimizing the associated radiation hazard. Conversely, computed tomography (CT) measurements of geomaterials are not limited by the radiation dose. In contrast to the h…
Philips Innovation Labs（飞利浦创新实验室）；Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology（斯科尔科沃科学技术研究院）
Computed Tomography (CT) imposes risk on the patients due to its inherent X-ray radiation, stimulating the development of low-dose CT (LDCT) imaging methods. Lowering the radiation dose reduces the health risks but leads to noisier measurements, which decreases the tissue contrast and causes artifacts in CT images. Ultimately, these issues could affect the perception of medical personnel and could cause misdiagnosis. Modern deep learning noise suppression methods alleviate the challenge but require low-noise-high-noise CT image pairs for training, rarely collected in regular clinical workflows…
DeepVox and SAVE-CT: a contrast- and dose-independent 3D deep learning approach for thoracic aorta segmentation and aneurysm prediction using computed tomography scans
Albert Einstein Israeli Institute of Education and Research（阿尔伯特·爱因斯坦以色列教育与研究学院）；Health Innovation Techcenter（健康创新技术中心）；Department of Radiology（放射科）；Department of Vascular and Endovascular Surgery（血管与血管外科）
本研究提出 DeepVox 分割模型和 SAVE-CT 分类模型，在独立于对比剂和剂量的 3D CT 扫描上实现全自动胸主动脉瘤筛查，分割和分类测试集表现优异，有望降低死亡率并优化放射科评估队列。
Guangdong Cardiovascular Institute（广东省心血管病研究所）；Guangdong Academy of Medical Sciences（广东省医学科学院）；University of Notre Dame（圣母大学）
As one of the most commonly ordered imaging tests, computed tomography (CT) scan comes with inevitable radiation exposure that increases the cancer risk to patients. However, CT image quality is directly related to radiation dose, thus it is desirable to obtain high-quality CT images with as little dose as possible. CT image denoising tries to obtain high dose like high-quality CT images (domain X) from low dose low-quality CTimages (domain Y), which can be treated as an image-to-image translation task where the goal is to learn the transform between a source domain X (noisy images) and a targ…
Samsung Medical Center（三星医疗中心）；Sungkyunkwan University School of Medicine（成均馆大学医学院）；Sungkyunkwan University（成均馆大学）
Computer-aided diagnosis for low-dose computed tomography (CT) based on deep learning has recently attracted attention as a first-line automatic testing tool because of its high accuracy and low radiation exposure. However, existing methods rely on supervised learning, imposing an additional burden to doctors for collecting disease data or annotating spatial labels for network training, consequently hindering their implementation. We propose a method based on a deep neural network for computer-aided diagnosis called virtual multi-view projection and reconstruction for unsupervised anomaly dete…
Fast and automatic algorithm to segment Brain (intracranial region) from computed tomography (CT) head images using combination of HU thresholding, identification of intracranial voxels through ray intersection with cranium, special binary erosion and connected components per slice.
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…
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center（德克萨斯大学西南医学中心）
Generalizability is a concern when applying a deep learning (DL) model trained on one dataset to other datasets. Training a universal model that works anywhere, anytime, for anybody is unrealistic. In this work, we demonstrate the generalizability problem, then explore potential solutions based on transfer learning (TL) by using the cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) to computed tomography (CT) image conversion task as the testbed. Previous works have converted CBCT to CT-like images. However, all of those works studied only one or two anatomical sites and used images from the same vendor's …
Low dose computed tomography is a mainstream for clinical applications. How-ever, compared to normal dose CT, in the low dose CT (LDCT) images, there are stronger noise and more artifacts which are obstacles for practical applications. In the last few years, convolution-based end-to-end deep learning methods have been widely used for LDCT image denoising. Recently, transformer has shown superior performance over convolution with more feature interactions. Yet its ap-plications in LDCT denoising have not been fully cultivated. Here, we propose a convolution-free T2T vision transformer-based Enc…
Low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) is an important topic in the field of radiology over the past decades. LDCT reduces ionizing radiation-induced patient health risks but it also results in a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and a potential compromise in the diagnostic performance. In this paper, to improve the LDCT denoising performance, we introduce the conditional denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM) and show encouraging results with a high computational efficiency. Specifically, given the high sampling cost of the original DDPM model, we adapt the fast ordinary differential equat…
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…
Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg（埃尔朗根-纽伦堡弗里德里希-亚历山大大学）；Siemens Healthineers AG（西门子医疗集团）
The use of deep learning has successfully solved several problems in the field of medical imaging. Deep learning has been applied to the CT denoising problem successfully. However, the use of deep learning requires large amounts of data to train deep convolutional networks (CNNs). Moreover, due to large parameter count, such deep CNNs may cause unexpected results. In this study, we introduce a novel CT denoising framework, which has interpretable behaviour, and provides useful results with limited data. We employ bilateral filtering in both the projection and volume domains to remove noise. To…
Low-Dose 3D Bonding Mapping Through "Soft" Core-Loss EELS Tomography and Unsupervised Deep Learning
Université de Lille（里尔大学）；Instituto de Nanociencia y Materiales de Aragon (INMA), CSIC-U. de Zaragoza（阿拉贡纳米科学与材料研究所（INMA），萨拉戈萨大学/西班牙国家研究委员会）；Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CEA, Leti（格勒诺布尔阿尔卑斯大学，法国原子能和替代能源委员会，技术研究所）；Centre d’Elaboration de Matériaux et d’Etudes Structurales (CEMES), University of Toulouse and CNRS（材料与结构研究制备中心（CEMES），图卢兹大学及法国国家科学研究中心）；Univ. Lille, FR 2638-IMEC-Institut Michel-Eugène Chevreul（里尔大学，FR 2638-IMEC-米歇尔·欧仁·谢弗勒尔研究所）；CEA, Joliot, NeuroSpin（法国原子能和替代能源委员会，若利奥神经影像中心）；Inria, MIND, Université Paris-Saclay（法国国家信息与自动化研究所，MIND团队，巴黎萨克雷大学）；Department of Inorganic and Organic Chemistry, Inorganic Chemistry Section, University of Barcelona（巴塞罗那大学无机与有机化学系，无机化学教研室）；Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (IN2UB), Universitat de Barcelona（巴塞罗那大学纳米科学与纳米技术研究所（IN2UB））；Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Ångström Laboratory, Uppsala University（乌普萨拉大学昂斯特实验室材料科学与工程系）；LENS-MIND, Departament d'Enginyeria Electrònica i Biomèdica, Universitat de Barcelona（巴塞罗那大学电子与生物医学工程系，LENS-MIND）；Laboratorio de Microscopias Avanzadas, Universidad de Zaragoza（萨拉戈萨大学先进显微术实验室）
Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg（埃尔朗根-纽伦堡弗里德里希-亚历山大大学）；Fraunhofer Institute for Ceramic Technologies and Systems IKTS（弗劳恩霍夫陶瓷技术与系统研究所（IKTS））；Leibniz Institute for Analytical Sciences ISAS（莱布尼茨分析科学研究所（ISAS））；University Hospital Erlangen（埃尔朗根大学医院）；Institute for Nanotechnology and Correlative Microscopy e.V. INAM（纳米技术与关联显微镜协会研究所（INAM））
Computed tomography is widely used as an imaging tool to visualize three-dimensional structures with expressive bone-soft tissue contrast. However, CT resolution and radiation dose are tightly entangled, highlighting the importance of low-dose CT combined with sophisticated denoising algorithms. Most data-driven denoising techniques are based on deep neural networks and, therefore, contain hundreds of thousands of trainable parameters, making them incomprehensible and prone to prediction failures. Developing understandable and robust denoising algorithms achieving state-of-the-art performance …
WIA-LD2ND: Wavelet-based Image Alignment for Self-supervised Low-Dose CT Denoising
School of Computer Science, Wuhan University（武汉大学计算机学院）；School of Computer Science, Central China Normal University（华中师范大学计算机学院）；University of Louisville（路易斯维尔大学）
Terahertz computed tomography (THz CT) has drawn significant attention because of its unique capability to bring multi-dimensional object information from invisible to visible. However, current physics-model-based THz CT modalities present low data use efficiency on time-resolved THz signals and low model fusion extensibility, limiting their application fields' practical use. In this paper, we propose a supervised THz deep learning computed tomography (THz DL-CT) framework based on time-domain information. THz DL-CT restores superior THz tomographic images of 3D objects by extracting features …
Low-dose Computed Tomography (LDCT) reconstruction is an important task in medical image analysis. Recent years have seen many deep learning based methods, proved to be effective in this area. However, these methods mostly follow a supervised architecture, which needs paired CT image of full dose and quarter dose, and the solution is highly dependent on specific measurements. In this work, we introduce Denoising Diffusion LDCT Model, dubbed as DDLM, generating noise-free CT image using conditioned sampling. DDLM uses pretrained model, and need no training nor tuning process, thus our proposal …
Two-Phase Multi-Dose-Level PET Image Reconstruction with Dose Level Awareness
School of Computer Science, Sichuan University（四川大学计算机学院）；School of Biomedical Engineering & State Key Laboratory of Advanced Medical Materials and Devices, ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学生物医学工程学院 & 先进医学材料与器件国家重点实验室）；Shanghai United Imaging Intelligence Co., Ltd.（上海联影智能医疗科技有限公司）
Low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) became a clear trend in radiology with an aspiration to refrain from delivering excessive X-ray radiation to the patients. The reduction of the radiation dose decreases the risks to the patients but raises the noise level, affecting the quality of the images and their ultimate diagnostic value. One mitigation option is to consider pairs of low-dose and high-dose CT projections to train a denoising model using deep learning algorithms; however, such pairs are rarely available in practice. In this paper, we present a new self-supervised method for CT denoising…
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 i…
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute（伦斯勒理工学院）；UT Southwestern Medical Center（德克萨斯大学西南医学中心）；Stony Brook University（石溪大学）；U.S. Food and Drug Administration（美国食品药品监督管理局）
We propose a Noise Entangled GAN (NE-GAN) for simulating low-dose computed tomography (CT) images from a higher dose CT image. First, we present two schemes to generate a clean CT image and a noise image from the high-dose CT image. Then, given these generated images, an NE-GAN is proposed to simulate different levels of low-dose CT images, where the level of generated noise can be continuously controlled by a noise factor. NE-GAN consists of a generator and a set of discriminators, and the number of discriminators is determined by the number of noise levels during training. Compared with the …
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Centre（德克萨斯大学西南医学中心）
Despite the indispensable role of X-ray computed tomography (CT) in diagnostic medicine field, the associated ionizing radiation is still a major concern considering that it may cause genetic and cancerous diseases. Decreasing the exposure can reduce the dose and hence the radiation-related risk, but will also induce higher quantum noise. Supervised deep learning can be used to train a neural network to denoise the low-dose CT (LDCT). However, its success requires massive pixel-wise paired LDCT and normal-dose CT (NDCT) images, which are rarely available in real practice. To alleviate this pro…
With substantial public concerns on potential cancer risks and health hazards caused by the accumulated radiation exposure in medical imaging, reducing radiation dose in X-ray based medical imaging such as Computed Tomography Perfusion (CTP) has raised significant research interests. In this paper, we embrace the deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) based approaches and introduce Smoothed Dense-Convolution Neural Network (SDCNet) to recover high-dose quality CTP images from low-dose ones. SDCNet is composed of sub-network blocks cascaded by skip-connections to infer the noise (differential…
Deep Learning approaches for solving Inverse Problems in imaging have become very effective and are demonstrated to be quite competitive in the field. Comparing these approaches is a challenging task since they highly rely on the data and the setup that is used for training. We provide a public dataset of computed tomography images and simulated low-dose measurements suitable for training this kind of methods. With the LoDoPaB-CT Dataset we aim to create a benchmark that allows for a fair comparison. It contains over 40,000 scan slices from around 800 patients selected from the LIDC/IDRI Datab…
University of Michigan - Shanghai Jiao Tong University Joint Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学密西根学院）；Michigan State University（密歇根州立大学）
Achieving high-quality reconstructions from low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) measurements is of much importance in clinical settings. Model-based image reconstruction methods have been proven to be effective in removing artifacts in LDCT. In this work, we propose an approach to learn a rich two-layer clustering-based sparsifying transform model (MCST2), where image patches and their subsequent feature maps (filter residuals) are clustered into groups with different learned sparsifying filters per group. We investigate a penalized weighted least squares (PWLS) approach for LDCT reconstructio…
