Title
Multi-Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks for Edge Denoising of Computed Tomography Images
Abstract
AbstractAs one of the most commonly ordered imaging tests, the computed tomography (CT) scan comes with inevitable radiation exposure that increases cancer risk to patients. However, CT image quality is directly related to radiation dose, and thus it is desirable to obtain high-quality CT images with as little dose as possible. CT image denoising tries to obtain high-dose-like high-quality CT images (domain Y) from low dose low-quality CT images (domain X), which can be treated as an image-to-image translation task where the goal is to learn the transform between a source domain X (noisy images) and a target domain Y (clean images). Recently, the cycle-consistent adversarial denoising network (CCADN) has achieved state-of-the-art results by enforcing cycle-consistent loss without the need of paired training data, since the paired data is hard to collect due to patients’ interests and cardiac motion. However, out of concerns on patients’ privacy and data security, protocols typically require clinics to perform medical image processing tasks including CT image denoising locally (i.e., edge denoising). Therefore, the network models need to achieve high performance under various computation resource constraints including memory and performance. Our detailed analysis of CCADN raises a number of interesting questions that point to potential ways to further improve its performance using the same or even fewer computation resources. For example, if the noise is large leading to a significant difference between domain X and domain Y, can we bridge X and Y with a intermediate domain Z such that both the denoising process between X and Z and that between Z and Y are easier to learn? As such intermediate domains lead to multiple cycles, how do we best enforce cycle- consistency? Driven by these questions, we propose a multi-cycle-consistent adversarial network (MCCAN) that builds intermediate domains and enforces both local and global cycle-consistency for edge denoising of CT images. The global cycle-consistency couples all generators together to model the whole denoising process, whereas the local cycle-consistency imposes effective supervision on the process between adjacent domains. Experiments show that both local and global cycle-consistency are important for the success of MCCAN, which outperforms CCADN in terms of denoising quality with slightly less computation resource consumption.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1145/3462328
ACM Journal on Emerging Technologies in Computing Systems
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Adversarial network, computed tomography, deep learning, image denoising, image translation
Journal
17
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
4
1550-4832
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
13
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Xiaowe Xu100.34
Jiawei Zhang212.72
Jinglan Liu3136.79
Yukun Ding404.73
Tianchen Wang5208.02
Hailong Qiu632.12
Haiyun Yuan793.99
Jian Zhuang893.34
Wen Xie931.78
Yuhao Dong1011.05
Qianjun Jia1162.20
Meiping Huang1224.79
Yiyu Shi1310.69