Improving Low-Dose CT Image Using Residual Convolutional Network

Low-dose CT is an effective solution to alleviate radiation risk to patients, it also introduces additional noise and streak artifacts. In order to maintain a high image quality for low-dose scanned CT data, we propose a post-processing method based on deep learning and using 2-D and 3-D residual convolutional networks. Experimental results and comparisons with other competing methods show that the proposed approach can effectively reduce the low-dose noise and artifacts while preserving tissue details. It is also pointed out that the 3-D model can achieve better performance in both edge-preservation and noise-artifact suppression. Factors that may influence the model performance, such as model width, depth, and dropout, are also examined.