Plug-and-Play Self-Supervised Denoising for Pulmonary Perfusion MRI

TL;DR

This paper introduces a self-supervised denoising model to improve the quality of pulmonary perfusion MRI images, enhancing clarity and diagnostic value.

Contribution

A novel plug-and-play denoising model using self-supervised learning for pulmonary perfusion MRI is proposed.

Findings

PnP-BSN outperformed DnCNN and Gaussian filters in SNR, sharpness, and overall image quality.

Expert scores showed significant improvements with PnP-BSN compared to other methods (p < 0.05).

Improved denoising led to better quantitative fractal analysis of pulmonary perfusion images.

Abstract

Pulmonary dynamic contrast-enhanced (DCE) MRI is clinically useful for assessing pulmonary perfusion, but its signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is limited. A self-supervised learning network-based plug-and-play (PnP) denoising model was developed to improve the image quality of pulmonary perfusion MRI. A dataset of patients with suspected pulmonary diseases was used. Asymmetric pixel-shuffle downsampling blind-spot network (AP-BSN) training inputs were two-dimensional background-subtracted perfusion images without clean ground truth. The AP-BSN is incorporated into a PnP model (PnP-BSN) for balancing noise control and image fidelity. Model performance was evaluated by SNR, sharpness, and overall image quality from two radiologists. The fractal dimension and k-means segmentation of the pulmonary perfusion images were calculated for comparing denoising performance. The model was trained on 29 patients and tested on 8 patients. The performance of PnP-BSN was compared to denoising convolutional neural network (DnCNN) and a Gaussian filter. PnP-BSN showed the highest reader scores in terms of SNR, sharpness, and overall image quality as scored by two radiologists. The expert scoring results for DnCNN, Gaussian, and PnP-BSN were 2.25 ± 0.65, 2.44 ± 0.73, and 3.56 ± 0.73 for SNR; 2.62 ± 0.52, 2.62 ± 0.52, and 3.38 ± 0.64 for sharpness; and 2.16 ± 0.33, 2.34 ± 0.42, and 3.53 ± 0.51 for overall image quality (p < 0.05 for all). PnP-BSN outperformed DnCNN and a Gaussian filter for denoising pulmonary perfusion MRI, which led to improved quantitative fractal analysis.

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