Patch Triplet Similarity Purification for Guided Real-World Low-Dose CT Image Denoising

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Long, Junhao, Yang, Fengwei, Yan, Juncheng, Zhang, Baoping, Jin, Chao, Yang, Jian, Zou, Changliang, Xu, Jun
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866916593450090496
author Long, Junhao
Yang, Fengwei
Yan, Juncheng
Zhang, Baoping
Jin, Chao
Yang, Jian
Zou, Changliang
Xu, Jun
author_facet Long, Junhao
Yang, Fengwei
Yan, Juncheng
Zhang, Baoping
Jin, Chao
Yang, Jian
Zou, Changliang
Xu, Jun
contents Image denoising of low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) is an important problem for clinical diagnosis with reduced radiation exposure. Previous methods are mostly trained with pairs of synthetic or misaligned LDCT and normal-dose CT (NDCT) images. However, trained with synthetic noise or misaligned LDCT/NDCT image pairs, the denoising networks would suffer from blurry structure or motion artifacts. Since non-contrast CT (NCCT) images share the content characteristics to the corresponding NDCT images in a three-phase scan, they can potentially provide useful information for real-world LDCT image denoising. To exploit this aspect, in this paper, we propose to incorporate clean NCCT images as useful guidance for the learning of real-world LDCT image denoising networks. To alleviate the issue of spatial misalignment in training data, we design a new Patch Triplet Similarity Purification (PTSP) strategy to select highly similar patch (instead of image) triplets of LDCT, NDCT, and NCCT images for network training. Furthermore, we modify two image denoising transformers of SwinIR and HAT to accommodate the NCCT image guidance, by replacing vanilla self-attention with cross-attention. On our collected clinical dataset, the modified transformers trained with the data selected by our PTSP strategy show better performance than 15 comparison methods on real-world LDCT image denoising. Ablation studies validate the effectiveness of our NCCT image guidance and PTSP strategy. We will publicly release our data and code.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_00253
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Patch Triplet Similarity Purification for Guided Real-World Low-Dose CT Image Denoising
Long, Junhao
Yang, Fengwei
Yan, Juncheng
Zhang, Baoping
Jin, Chao
Yang, Jian
Zou, Changliang
Xu, Jun
Image and Video Processing
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Image denoising of low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) is an important problem for clinical diagnosis with reduced radiation exposure. Previous methods are mostly trained with pairs of synthetic or misaligned LDCT and normal-dose CT (NDCT) images. However, trained with synthetic noise or misaligned LDCT/NDCT image pairs, the denoising networks would suffer from blurry structure or motion artifacts. Since non-contrast CT (NCCT) images share the content characteristics to the corresponding NDCT images in a three-phase scan, they can potentially provide useful information for real-world LDCT image denoising. To exploit this aspect, in this paper, we propose to incorporate clean NCCT images as useful guidance for the learning of real-world LDCT image denoising networks. To alleviate the issue of spatial misalignment in training data, we design a new Patch Triplet Similarity Purification (PTSP) strategy to select highly similar patch (instead of image) triplets of LDCT, NDCT, and NCCT images for network training. Furthermore, we modify two image denoising transformers of SwinIR and HAT to accommodate the NCCT image guidance, by replacing vanilla self-attention with cross-attention. On our collected clinical dataset, the modified transformers trained with the data selected by our PTSP strategy show better performance than 15 comparison methods on real-world LDCT image denoising. Ablation studies validate the effectiveness of our NCCT image guidance and PTSP strategy. We will publicly release our data and code.
title Patch Triplet Similarity Purification for Guided Real-World Low-Dose CT Image Denoising
topic Image and Video Processing
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.00253