Tanveer MS, Wiedeman C, Li M, Shi Y, De Man B, Maltz JS, Wang G. Deep-silicon photon-counting x-ray
projection denoising through reinforcement learning.
J Xray Sci Technol 2024;
32:173-205. [PMID:
38217633 DOI:
10.3233/xst-230278]
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Abstract
BACKGROUND
In recent years, deep reinforcement learning (RL) has been applied to various medical tasks and produced encouraging results.
OBJECTIVE
In this paper, we demonstrate the feasibility of deep RL for denoising simulated deep-silicon photon-counting CT (PCCT) data in both full and interior scan modes. PCCT offers higher spatial and spectral resolution than conventional CT, requiring advanced denoising methods to suppress noise increase.
METHODS
In this work, we apply a dueling double deep Q network (DDDQN) to denoise PCCT data for maximum contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) and a multi-agent approach to handle data non-stationarity.
RESULTS
Using our method, we obtained significant image quality improvement for single-channel scans and consistent improvement for all three channels of multichannel scans. For the single-channel interior scans, the PSNR (dB) and SSIM increased from 33.4078 and 0.9165 to 37.4167 and 0.9790 respectively. For the multichannel interior scans, the channel-wise PSNR (dB) increased from 31.2348, 30.7114, and 30.4667 to 31.6182, 30.9783, and 30.8427 respectively. Similarly, the SSIM improved from 0.9415, 0.9445, and 0.9336 to 0.9504, 0.9493, and 0.0326 respectively.
CONCLUSIONS
Our results show that the RL approach improves image quality effectively, efficiently, and consistently across multiple spectral channels and has great potential in clinical applications.
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