Cross-domain Denoising for Low-dose Multi-frame Spiral Computed Tomography

TL;DR

This paper introduces a two-stage cross-domain denoising method for low-dose multi-slice spiral CT that effectively reduces noise while preserving resolution, outperforming existing methods in clinical evaluations.

Contribution

It presents a novel two-stage approach tailored for real-world multi-slice spiral CT, exploiting projection redundancy and addressing over-smoothing issues in denoising.

Findings

Removes up to 70% noise without losing spatial resolution

Outperforms state-of-the-art methods in clinical assessments

Validated on diverse datasets with radiologist support

Abstract

Computed tomography (CT) has been used worldwide as a non-invasive test to assist in diagnosis. However, the ionizing nature of X-ray exposure raises concerns about potential health risks such as cancer. The desire for lower radiation doses has driven researchers to improve reconstruction quality. Although previous studies on low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) denoising have demonstrated the effectiveness of learning-based methods, most were developed on the simulated data. However, the real-world scenario differs significantly from the simulation domain, especially when using the multi-slice spiral scanner geometry. This paper proposes a two-stage method for the commercially available multi-slice spiral CT scanners that better exploits the complete reconstruction pipeline for LDCT denoising across different domains. Our approach makes good use of the high redundancy of multi-slice projections and the volumetric reconstructions while leveraging the over-smoothing problem in conventional cascaded frameworks caused by aggressive denoising. The dedicated design also provides a more explicit interpretation of the data flow. Extensive experiments on various datasets showed that the proposed method could remove up to 70\% of noise without compromised spatial resolution, and subjective evaluations by two experienced radiologists further supported its superior performance against state-of-the-art methods in clinical practice.