Background: Low dose computed tomography (LDCT) uses lower radiation dose, but the reconstructed images contain higher noise that can have negative impact in disease diagnosis. Although deep learning with the edge extraction operators reserves edge information well, only applying the edge extraction operators to input LDCT images does not yield overall satisfactory results.
Objective: To improve LDCT images quality, this study proposes and tests a dual edge extraction multi-scale attention mechanism convolution neural network (DEMACNN) based on a compound loss.
Methods: The network uses edge extraction operators to extract edge information from both the input images and the feature maps in the network, improving the utilization of the edge operators and retaining the images edge information. The feature enhancement block is constructed by fusing the attention mechanism and multi-scale module, enhancing effective information, while suppressing useless information. The residual learning method is used to learn the network, improving the performance of the network, and solving the problem of gradient disappearance. Except for the network structure, a compound loss function, which consists of the MSE loss, the proposed joint total variation loss, and the edge loss, is proposed to enhance the denoising ability of the network and reserve the edge of images.
Results: Compared with other advanced methods (REDCNN, CT-former and EDCNN), the proposed new network achieves the best PSNR and SSIM values in LDCT images of the abdomen, which are 33.3486 and 0.9104, respectively. In addition, the new network also performs well on head and chest image data.
Conclusion: The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed new network structure and denoising algorithm not only effectively removes the noise in LDCT images, but also protects the edges and details of the images well.
Keywords: Low dose CT(LDCT); attention mechanism; convolution neural network (CNN); edge operator; image denoising; residual learning.