scholarly journals Degradation-Aware Deep Learning Framework for Sparse-View CT Reconstruction

Tomography ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 932-949
Author(s):  
Chang Sun ◽  
Yitong Liu ◽  
Hongwen Yang

Sparse-view CT reconstruction is a fundamental task in computed tomography to overcome undesired artifacts and recover the details of textual structure in degraded CT images. Recently, many deep learning-based networks have achieved desirable performances compared to iterative reconstruction algorithms. However, the performance of these methods may severely deteriorate when the degradation strength of the test image is not consistent with that of the training dataset. In addition, these methods do not pay enough attention to the characteristics of different degradation levels, so solely extending the training dataset with multiple degraded images is also not effective. Although training plentiful models in terms of each degradation level can mitigate this problem, extensive parameter storage is involved. Accordingly, in this paper, we focused on sparse-view CT reconstruction for multiple degradation levels. We propose a single degradation-aware deep learning framework to predict clear CT images by understanding the disparity of degradation in both the frequency domain and image domain. The dual-domain procedure can perform particular operations at different degradation levels in frequency component recovery and spatial details reconstruction. The peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), structural similarity (SSIM) and visual results demonstrate that our method outperformed the classical deep learning-based reconstruction methods in terms of effectiveness and scalability.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jinseok Lee

BACKGROUND The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has explosively spread worldwide since the beginning of 2020. According to a multinational consensus statement from the Fleischner Society, computed tomography (CT) can be used as a relevant screening tool owing to its higher sensitivity for detecting early pneumonic changes. However, physicians are extremely busy fighting COVID-19 in this era of worldwide crisis. Thus, it is crucial to accelerate the development of an artificial intelligence (AI) diagnostic tool to support physicians. OBJECTIVE We aimed to quickly develop an AI technique to diagnose COVID-19 pneumonia and differentiate it from non-COVID pneumonia and non-pneumonia diseases on CT. METHODS A simple 2D deep learning framework, named fast-track COVID-19 classification network (FCONet), was developed to diagnose COVID-19 pneumonia based on a single chest CT image. FCONet was developed by transfer learning, using one of the four state-of-art pre-trained deep learning models (VGG16, ResNet50, InceptionV3, or Xception) as a backbone. For training and testing of FCONet, we collected 3,993 chest CT images of patients with COVID-19 pneumonia, other pneumonia, and non-pneumonia diseases from Wonkwang University Hospital, Chonnam National University Hospital, and the Italian Society of Medical and Interventional Radiology public database. These CT images were split into a training and a testing set at a ratio of 8:2. For the test dataset, the diagnostic performance to diagnose COVID-19 pneumonia was compared among the four pre-trained FCONet models. In addition, we tested the FCONet models on an additional external testing dataset extracted from the embedded low-quality chest CT images of COVID-19 pneumonia in recently published papers. RESULTS Of the four pre-trained models of FCONet, the ResNet50 showed excellent diagnostic performance (sensitivity 99.58%, specificity 100%, and accuracy 99.87%) and outperformed the other three pre-trained models in testing dataset. In additional external test dataset using low-quality CT images, the detection accuracy of the ResNet50 model was the highest (96.97%), followed by Xception, InceptionV3, and VGG16 (90.71%, 89.38%, and 87.12%, respectively). CONCLUSIONS The FCONet, a simple 2D deep learning framework based on a single chest CT image, provides excellent diagnostic performance in detecting COVID-19 pneumonia. Based on our testing dataset, the ResNet50-based FCONet might be the best model, as it outperformed other FCONet models based on VGG16, Xception, and InceptionV3.


Electronics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (10) ◽  
pp. 1136
Author(s):  
David Augusto Ribeiro ◽  
Juan Casavílca Silva ◽  
Renata Lopes Rosa ◽  
Muhammad Saadi ◽  
Shahid Mumtaz ◽  
...  

Light field (LF) imaging has multi-view properties that help to create many applications that include auto-refocusing, depth estimation and 3D reconstruction of images, which are required particularly for intelligent transportation systems (ITSs). However, cameras can present a limited angular resolution, becoming a bottleneck in vision applications. Thus, there is a challenge to incorporate angular data due to disparities in the LF images. In recent years, different machine learning algorithms have been applied to both image processing and ITS research areas for different purposes. In this work, a Lightweight Deformable Deep Learning Framework is implemented, in which the problem of disparity into LF images is treated. To this end, an angular alignment module and a soft activation function into the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) are implemented. For performance assessment, the proposed solution is compared with recent state-of-the-art methods using different LF datasets, each one with specific characteristics. Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed solution achieved a better performance than the other methods. The image quality results obtained outperform state-of-the-art LF image reconstruction methods. Furthermore, our model presents a lower computational complexity, decreasing the execution time.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 268
Author(s):  
Yeganeh Jalali ◽  
Mansoor Fateh ◽  
Mohsen Rezvani ◽  
Vahid Abolghasemi ◽  
Mohammad Hossein Anisi

Lung CT image segmentation is a key process in many applications such as lung cancer detection. It is considered a challenging problem due to existing similar image densities in the pulmonary structures, different types of scanners, and scanning protocols. Most of the current semi-automatic segmentation methods rely on human factors therefore it might suffer from lack of accuracy. Another shortcoming of these methods is their high false-positive rate. In recent years, several approaches, based on a deep learning framework, have been effectively applied in medical image segmentation. Among existing deep neural networks, the U-Net has provided great success in this field. In this paper, we propose a deep neural network architecture to perform an automatic lung CT image segmentation process. In the proposed method, several extensive preprocessing techniques are applied to raw CT images. Then, ground truths corresponding to these images are extracted via some morphological operations and manual reforms. Finally, all the prepared images with the corresponding ground truth are fed into a modified U-Net in which the encoder is replaced with a pre-trained ResNet-34 network (referred to as Res BCDU-Net). In the architecture, we employ BConvLSTM (Bidirectional Convolutional Long Short-term Memory)as an advanced integrator module instead of simple traditional concatenators. This is to merge the extracted feature maps of the corresponding contracting path into the previous expansion of the up-convolutional layer. Finally, a densely connected convolutional layer is utilized for the contracting path. The results of our extensive experiments on lung CT images (LIDC-IDRI database) confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method where a dice coefficient index of 97.31% is achieved.


Sensors ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (18) ◽  
pp. 3941 ◽  
Author(s):  
Li ◽  
Cai ◽  
Wang ◽  
Zhang ◽  
Tang ◽  
...  

Limited-angle computed tomography (CT) image reconstruction is a challenging problem in the field of CT imaging. In some special applications, limited by the geometric space and mechanical structure of the imaging system, projections can only be collected with a scanning range of less than 90°. We call this kind of serious limited-angle problem the ultra-limited-angle problem, which is difficult to effectively alleviate by traditional iterative reconstruction algorithms. With the development of deep learning, the generative adversarial network (GAN) performs well in image inpainting tasks and can add effective image information to restore missing parts of an image. In this study, given the characteristic of GAN to generate missing information, the sinogram-inpainting-GAN (SI-GAN) is proposed to restore missing sinogram data to suppress the singularity of the truncated sinogram for ultra-limited-angle reconstruction. We propose the U-Net generator and patch-design discriminator in SI-GAN to make the network suitable for standard medical CT images. Furthermore, we propose a joint projection domain and image domain loss function, in which the weighted image domain loss can be added by the back-projection operation. Then, by inputting a paired limited-angle/180° sinogram into the network for training, we can obtain the trained model, which has extracted the continuity feature of sinogram data. Finally, the classic CT reconstruction method is used to reconstruct the images after obtaining the estimated sinograms. The simulation studies and actual data experiments indicate that the proposed method performed well to reduce the serious artifacts caused by ultra-limited-angle scanning.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (11) ◽  
pp. 2707-2713
Author(s):  
Zheng Sun ◽  
Xiangyang Yan

Intravascular photoacoustic tomography (IVPAT) is a newly developed imaging modality in the interventional diagnosis and treatment of coronary artery diseases. Incomplete acoustic measurement caused by limitedview scanning of the detector in the vascular lumen results in under-sampling artifacts and distortion in the images reconstructed by using the standard reconstruction methods. A method for limited-view IVPAT image reconstruction based on deep learning is presented in this paper. A convolutional neural network (CNN) is constructed and trained with computer-simulated image data set. Then, the trained CNN is used to optimize the cross-sectional images of the vessel which are recovered from the incomplete photoacoustic measurements by using the standard time-reversal (TR) algorithm to obtain the images with the improved quality. Results of numerical demonstration indicate that the method can effectively reduce the image distortion and artifacts caused by the limited-view detection. Furthermore, it is superior to the compressed sensing (CS) method in recovering the unmeasured information of the imaging target with the structural similarity around 10% higher than CS reconstruction.


2020 ◽  
Vol 191 ◽  
pp. 105387
Author(s):  
Floris Heutink ◽  
Valentin Koch ◽  
Berit Verbist ◽  
Willem Jan van der Woude ◽  
Emmanuel Mylanus ◽  
...  

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 44
Author(s):  
Johannes Leuschner ◽  
Maximilian Schmidt ◽  
Poulami Somanya Ganguly ◽  
Vladyslav Andriiashen ◽  
Sophia Bethany Coban ◽  
...  

The reconstruction of computed tomography (CT) images is an active area of research. Following the rise of deep learning methods, many data-driven models have been proposed in recent years. In this work, we present the results of a data challenge that we organized, bringing together algorithm experts from different institutes to jointly work on quantitative evaluation of several data-driven methods on two large, public datasets during a ten day sprint. We focus on two applications of CT, namely, low-dose CT and sparse-angle CT. This enables us to fairly compare different methods using standardized settings. As a general result, we observe that the deep learning-based methods are able to improve the reconstruction quality metrics in both CT applications while the top performing methods show only minor differences in terms of peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity (SSIM). We further discuss a number of other important criteria that should be taken into account when selecting a method, such as the availability of training data, the knowledge of the physical measurement model and the reconstruction speed.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (23) ◽  
pp. 11467
Author(s):  
Núria Valls Canudas ◽  
Míriam Calvo Gómez ◽  
Elisabet Golobardes Ribé ◽  
Xavier Vilasis-Cardona

The optimization of reconstruction algorithms has become a key aspect in the field of experimental particle physics. Since technology has allowed gradually increasing the complexity of the measurements, the amount of data taken that needs to be interpreted has grown as well. This is the case with the LHCb experiment at CERN, where a major upgrade currently undergoing will considerably increase the data processing rate. This has presented the need to search for specific reconstruction techniques that aim to accelerate one of the most time consuming reconstruction algorithms in LHCb, the electromagnetic calorimeter clustering. Together with the use of deep learning techniques and the understanding of the current reconstruction algorithm, we propose a method that decomposes the reconstruction process into small parts that can be formulated as a cellular automaton. This approach is shown to benefit the generalized learning of small convolutional neural network architectures and also simplify the training dataset. Final results applied to a complete LHCb simulation reconstruction are compatible in terms of efficiency, and execute in nearly constant time with independence on the complexity of the data.


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