PET image denoising based on denoising diffusion probabilistic models
Gordon Center for Medical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院麻省总医院戈登医学成像中心）；Center for Advanced Medical Computing and Analysis, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院麻省总医院高级医学计算与分析中心）；University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center（德克萨斯大学MD安德森癌症中心）
Kuang Gong, Keith A. Johnson, Georges El Fakhri, Quanzheng Li, Tinsu Pan
Due to various physical degradation factors and limited counts received, PET image quality needs further improvements. The denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPM) are distribution learning-based models, which try to transform a normal distribution into a specific data distribution based on iterative refinements. In this work, we proposed and evaluated different DDPM-based methods for PET image denoising. Under the DDPM framework, one way to perform PET image denoising is to provide the PET image and/or the prior image as the network input. Another way is to supply the prior image as the input with the PET image included in the refinement steps, which can fit for scenarios of different noise levels. 120 18F-FDG datasets and 140 18F-MK-6240 datasets were utilized to evaluate the proposed DDPM-based methods. Quantification show that the DDPM-based frameworks with PET information included can generate better results than the nonlocal mean and Unet-based denoising methods. Adding additional MR prior in the model can help achieve better performance and further reduce the uncertainty during image denoising. Solely relying on MR prior while ignoring the PET information can result in large bias. Regional and surface quantification shows that employing MR prior as the network input while embedding PET image as a data-consistency constraint during inference can achieve the best performance. In summary, DDPM-based PET image denoising is a flexible framework, which can efficiently utilize prior information and achieve better performance than the nonlocal mean and Unet-based denoising methods.
This paper evaluates the performance of supervised and unsupervised deep learning models for denoising positron emission tomography (PET) images in the presence of reduced acquisition times. Our experiments consider 212 studies (56908 images), and evaluate the models using 2D (RMSE, SSIM) and 3D (SUVpeak and SUVmax error for the regions of interest) metrics. It was shown that, in contrast to previous studies, supervised models (ResNet, Unet, SwinIR) outperform unsupervised models (pix2pix GAN and CycleGAN with ResNet backbone and various auxiliary losses) in the reconstruction of 2D PET images…
Cycle-Constrained Adversarial Denoising Convolutional Network for PET Image Denoising: Multi-Dimensional Validation on Large Datasets with Reader Study and Real Low-Dose Data
Center of Advanced Medical Computing and Analysis, MGH/HMS（麻省总医院/哈佛医学院高级医学计算与分析中心）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；GE Healthcare（通用电气医疗）；University of Bern（伯尔尼大学）
In PET, the amount of relative (signal-dependent) noise present in different body regions can be significantly different and is inherently related to the number of counts present in that region. The number of counts in a region depends, in principle and among other factors, on the total administered activity, scanner sensitivity, image acquisition duration, radiopharmaceutical tracer uptake in the region, and patient local body morphometry surrounding the region. In theory, less amount of denoising operations is needed to denoise a high-count (low relative noise) image than images a low-count …
Low-resolution and signal-dependent noise distribution in positron emission tomography (PET) images makes denoising process an inevitable step prior to qualitative and quantitative image analysis tasks. Conventional PET denoising methods either over-smooth small-sized structures due to resolution limitation or make incorrect assumptions about the noise characteristics. Therefore, clinically important quantitative information may be corrupted. To address these challenges, we introduced a novel approach to remove signal-dependent noise in the PET images where the noise distribution was considere…
Hamamatsu Photonics K. K.（滨松光子学株式会社）；Hamamatsu University School of Medicine（滨松医科大学）
Although supervised convolutional neural networks (CNNs) often outperform conventional alternatives for denoising positron emission tomography (PET) images, they require many low- and high-quality reference PET image pairs. Herein, we propose an unsupervised 3D PET image denoising method based on an anatomical information-guided attention mechanism. The proposed magnetic resonance-guided deep decoder (MR-GDD) utilizes the spatial details and semantic features of MR-guidance image more effectively by introducing encoder-decoder and deep decoder subnetworks. Moreover, the specific shapes and pat…
UniPET: a universal network for high-quality PET image denoising across varied dose reduction factors
School of Biological Science and Medical Engineering（生物科学与医学工程学院）；State Key Laboratory of Software Development Environment（软件开发环境国家重点实验室）；Key Laboratory of Biomechanics, Mechanobiology of Ministry of Education（教育部生物力学与机械生物学重点实验室）；Beijing Advanced Innovation Centre for Biomedical Engineering, Beihang University（北京生物医学工程先进创新中心，北航）；Department of Biomedical Engineering（生物医学工程系）；Department of Gynecology Oncology（妇科肿瘤科）；National Cancer Center/National Clinical Research Center for Cancer/Cancer Hospital（国家癌症中心/国家癌症临床研究中心/癌症医院）；Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences（中国医学科学院）；Peking Union Medical College（北京协和医学院）；Xiaomi Corporation（小米公司）
Exploiting network optimization stability for enhanced PET image denoising using deep image prior
Central Research Laboratory, Hamamatsu Photonics K. K.（滨松光子学株式会社中央研究所）；Institute for Quantum Medical Science, National Institutes for Quantum Science and Technology (QST)（国立量子科学技术研究开发机构量子医学科学研究所）；J. Crayton Pruitt Family Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Florida（佛罗里达大学J. Crayton Pruitt家族生物医学工程系）
A Kernel Space-based Multidimensional Sparse Model for Dynamic PET Image Denoising
Zhejiang Polytechnic University of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering（浙江机电职业技术学院）；Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center（合肥国家综合科学中心人工智能研究院）；School of Electrical and Optical Engineering（南京理工大学电气与光学工程学院）；Zhejiang Lab（浙江实验室）；School of Intelligent Science and Technology（智能科学与技术学院）；Hangzhou Institute for Advanced Study, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（杭州高等研究院，中国科学院大学）；Biomedical Imaging Laboratory (BIG), Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Macau（澳门大学生物医学成像实验室）；College of Optical Science and Engineering（光学工程学院）；College of Biomedical Engineering and Instrument Science（生物医学工程与仪器科学学院）
Rician Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models For Sodium Breast MRI Enhancement
University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Universitat de Barcelona（巴塞罗那大学）；Haukeland University Hospital（豪克兰大学医院）；University of York（约克大学）；Manchester Metropolitan University（曼彻斯特城市大学）
MPI-CBG/PKS (CSBD)（马克斯·普朗克分子细胞生物学与遗传学研究所/普朗克计算生物学中心（德累斯顿系统生物学中心））；Brno University of Technology（布尔诺理工大学）
Today, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are the leading method for image denoising. They are traditionally trained on pairs of images, which are often hard to obtain for practical applications. This motivates self-supervised training methods such as Noise2Void~(N2V) that operate on single noisy images. Self-supervised methods are, unfortunately, not competitive with models trained on image pairs. Here, we present 'Probabilistic Noise2Void' (PN2V), a method to train CNNs to predict per-pixel intensity distributions. Combining these with a suitable description of the noise, we obtain a compl…
Spach Transformer: Spatial and Channel-wise Transformer Based on Local and Global Self-attentions for PET Image Denoising
Gordon Center for Medical Imaging（戈登医学影像中心）；Center for Advanced Medical Computing and Analysis（高级医学计算与分析中心）；Massachusetts General Hospital（麻省总医院）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）；University of Florida（佛罗里达大学）；University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center（德克萨斯大学MD安德森癌症中心）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）
针对 PET 图像噪声及三维全局自注意力计算成本高的问题，提出融合局部与全局 MSA 的空间通道编解码 Transformer，并在多示踪剂数据集上验证其去噪性能优于现有深度学习架构。
U-TTT: Towards Generalizable PET Image Denoising via Test-Time Training
School of Biological Science and Medical Engineering, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学生物科学与医学工程学院）；Department of Biomedical Engineering, Tsinghua University（清华大学生物医学工程系）；School of Aerospace Engineering, Tsinghua University（清华大学航天航空学院）；ByteDance Inc.（字节跳动有限公司）
Sichuan University（四川大学）；MinFound Medical Systems Co., Ltd（明峰医疗系统股份有限公司）
Positron emission tomography (PET) reconstruction has become an ill-posed inverse problem due to low-count projection data, and a robust algorithm is urgently required to improve imaging quality. Recently, the deep image prior (DIP) has drawn much attention and has been successfully applied in several image restoration tasks, such as denoising and inpainting, since it does not need any labels (reference image). However, overfitting is a vital defect of this framework. Hence, many methods have been proposed to mitigate this problem, and DeepRED is a typical representation that combines DIP and …
DifFIQA: Face Image Quality Assessment Using Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models
University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Electrical Engineering（卢布尔雅那大学电气工程学院）；University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Computer and Information Science（卢布尔雅那大学计算机与信息科学学院）
Regularization by denoising: Bayesian model and Langevin-within-split Gibbs sampling
Institut Denis Poisson, University of Orléans（德尼·泊松研究所，奥尔良大学）；University of Toulouse, IRIT/INP-ENSEEIHT, CNRS（图卢兹大学，法国国家信息与自动化研究所/国立高等电子、电子技术、计算机与机械学院，法国国家科学研究中心）
本文提出一种基于去噪正则化（RED）的图像反演贝叶斯框架，并设计了内含Langevin Monte Carlo步骤的分裂Gibbs采样算法，通过去模糊等任务验证了其有效性。
Volumetric Conditional Score-based Residual Diffusion Model for PET/MR Denoising
Massachusetts General Hospital（麻省总医院）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Neuroscience Research Institute（神经科学研究所）；Gachon University of Medicine and Science（嘉泉医科大学）
MDAA-Diff: CT-Guided Multi-Dose Adaptive Attention Diffusion Model for PET Denoising
School of Biomedical Engineering, Southern Medical University（南方医科大学生物医学工程学院）；School of Biomedical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学生物医学工程学院）；Nanfang PET Center, Nanfang Hospital Southern Medical University（南方医科大学南芳医院PET中心）
End-to-end Triple-domain PET Enhancement: A Hybrid Denoising-and-reconstruction Framework for Reconstructing Standard-dose PET Images from Low-dose PET Sinograms
ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学）；Shanghai United Imaging Intelligence Co., Ltd.（上海联影智能医疗科技有限公司）；Shanghai Clinical Research and Trial Center（上海临床研究与试验中心）；Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）
提出端到端三域 TriPLET 框架，融合投影域去噪、小波域重建和图像域对抗评估，从低剂量 PET 正弦图恢复标准剂量图像，并取得最优相似度与信噪比。
Gating is commonly used in PET imaging to reduce respiratory motion blurring and facilitate more sophisticated motion correction methods. In the applications of low dose PET, however, reducing injection dose causes increased noise and reduces signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), subsequently corrupting the motion estimation/correction steps, causing inferior image quality. To tackle these issues, we first propose a Siamese adversarial network (SAN) that can efficiently recover high dose gated image volume from low dose gated image volume. To ensure the appearance consistency between the recovered gate…
FedFTN: Personalized Federated Learning with Deep Feature Transformation Network for Multi-institutional Low-count PET Denoising
Yale University（耶鲁大学）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）；University of California Irvine（加州大学欧文分校）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Ruijin Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine（上海交通大学医学院附属瑞金医院）；Inselspital, Bern University Hospital（伯尔尼大学医院 Inselspital）；University of Bern（伯尔尼大学）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）
Self is the Best Learner: CT-free Ultra-Low-Dose PET Organ Segmentation via Collaborating Denoising and Segmentation Learning
School of Biomedical Engineering, Southern Medical University（生物医学工程学院，南方医科大学）；School of Biomedical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（生物医学工程学院，上海交通大学）；Nanfang PET Center, Nanfang Hospital Southern Medical University（南芳PET中心，南方医科大学南芳医院）；Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Medical Image Processing, Southern Medical University（广东省医学图像处理重点实验室，南方医科大学）；Guangdong Province Engineering Laboratory for Medical Imaging and Diagnostic Technology, Southern Medical University（广东省医学影像与诊断技术工程实验室，南方医科大学）；Pazhou Lab（琶洲实验室）
Positron Emission Tomography (PET) is an essential technique in many clinical applications that allows for quantitative imaging at the molecular level. This study aims to develop a denoising method using novel dilated convolutional neural network to recover full-count images from low-count images. We adopted similar hierarchal structure from the conventional uNet and incorporated dilated kernels in each convolution to allow the network to observe larger, and perhaps, more robust, features within the image. Our dNet were trained alongside a uNet for comparison. Our 2.5D model used a training se…
Peking University（北京大学）；Academy for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies（前沿交叉学科研究院）；Massachusetts General Hospital（麻省总医院）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）
We propose a novel and unified method, measurement-conditioned denoising diffusion probabilistic model (MC-DDPM), for under-sampled medical image reconstruction based on DDPM. Different from previous works, MC-DDPM is defined in measurement domain (e.g. k-space in MRI reconstruction) and conditioned on under-sampling mask. We apply this method to accelerate MRI reconstruction and the experimental results show excellent performance, outperforming full supervision baseline and the state-of-the-art score-based reconstruction method. Due to its generative nature, MC-DDPM can also quantify the unce…
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…
Gordon Center for Medical Imaging（戈登医学影像中心）；Massachusetts General Hospital（麻省总医院）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）；Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging（马蒂诺斯生物医学影像中心）；University of California, Davis（加州大学戴维斯分校）
Direct reconstruction methods have been developed to estimate parametric images directly from the measured PET sinograms by combining the PET imaging model and tracer kinetics in an integrated framework. Due to limited counts received, signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) and resolution of parametric images produced by direct reconstruction frameworks are still limited. Recently supervised deep learning methods have been successfully applied to medical imaging denoising/reconstruction when large number of high-quality training labels are available. For static PET imaging, high-quality training labels c…
We propose a novel unpaired image-to-image translation method that uses denoising diffusion probabilistic models without requiring adversarial training. Our method, UNpaired Image Translation with Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (UNIT-DDPM), trains a generative model to infer the joint distribution of images over both domains as a Markov chain by minimising a denoising score matching objective conditioned on the other domain. In particular, we update both domain translation models simultaneously, and we generate target domain images by a denoising Markov Chain Monte Carlo approach tha…
Quantitative accuracy and thus diagnostic precision in Emission Tomography is impaired by the inherent random characteristics of the data acquisition leading to statistical image noise. Edge preserving spatial variation regularized iterative image reconstruction approaches require case-specific control parameter adaptation for optimized contrast-vs-noise tradeoff. For MLEM reconstruction, we propose and evaluate iRDF which automatically adapts RDP edge preservation parameters according to local image noise and PET data characteristics. In order to distinguish between clustered noise spots and …
Pseudo-MRI-Guided PET Image Reconstruction Method Based on a Diffusion Probabilistic Model
Washington University in St. Louis（圣路易斯华盛顿大学）；Yale University（耶鲁大学）；Western University（西安大略大学）；Lawson Health Research Institute（劳森健康研究所）；McGill University（麦吉尔大学）；Siemens Healthineers AG（西门子医疗保健公司）；Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology（马林克罗特放射学研究所）
Retinal OCT Synthesis with Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models for Layer Segmentation
Institute of Imaging and Computer Vision, RWTH Aachen University（成像与计算机视觉研究所，亚琛RWTH大学）；Bio-manufacturing Engineering Laboratory of Tsinghua SIGS, Tsinghua University（清华大学SIGS生物制造工程实验室）；Shenzhen Eye Hospital（深圳眼科医院）；Department of Ophthalmology, RWTH Aachen University（眼科部，亚琛RWTH大学）
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…
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…
Fed-NDIF: A Noise-Embedded Federated Diffusion Model For Low-Count Whole-Body PET Denoising
Yale University（耶鲁大学）；Northwestern University（西北大学）；Ruijin Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine（上海交通大学医学院附属瑞金医院）；Inselspital, Bern University Hospital, University of Bern（伯尔尼大学医院 Inselspital，伯尔尼大学）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Yale School of Medicine（耶鲁医学院）
Diffusion models have shown promising results on single-image super-resolution and other image- to-image translation tasks. Despite this success, they have not outperformed state-of-the-art GAN models on the more challenging blind super-resolution task, where the input images are out of distribution, with unknown degradations. This paper introduces SR3+, a diffusion-based model for blind super-resolution, establishing a new state-of-the-art. To this end, we advocate self-supervised training with a combination of composite, parameterized degradations for self-supervised training, and noise-cond…
