Abstract
Being low-level radiation exposure and less harmful to health, low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) has been widely adopted in the early screening of lung cancer and COVID-19. LDCT images inevitably suffer from the degradation problem caused by complex noises. It was reported that, compared with commercial iterative reconstruction methods, deep learning (DL)-based LDCT denoising methods using convolutional neural network (CNN) achieved competitive performance. Most existing DL-based methods focus on the local information extracted by CNN, while ignoring both explicit non-local and context information (which are leveraged by radiologists). To address this issue, we propose a novel deep learning model named radiologist-inspired deep denoising network (RIDnet) to imitate the workflow of a radiologist reading LDCT images. Concretely, the proposed model explicitly integrates all the local, non-local and context information rather than local information only. Our radiologist-inspired model is potentially favoured by radiologists as a familiar workflow. A double-blind reader study on a public clinical dataset shows that, compared with state-of-the-art methods, our proposed model achieves the most impressive performance in terms of the structural fidelity, the noise suppression and the overall score. As a physicians-inspired model, RIDnet gives a new research roadmap that takes into account the behavior of physicians when designing decision support tools for assisting clinical diagnosis. Models and code are available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.07146
