학술논문

SeNAS-Net: Self-Supervised Noise and Artifact Suppression Network for Material Decomposition in Spectral CT
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Transactions on Computational Imaging IEEE Trans. Comput. Imaging Computational Imaging, IEEE Transactions on. 10:677-689 2024
Subject
Signal Processing and Analysis
Computing and Processing
General Topics for Engineers
Geoscience
Noise
Computed tomography
Noise reduction
Imaging
Noise measurement
Image reconstruction
X-ray imaging
Material decomposition
neural network
photon counting CT
self-supervised learning
spectral CT
Language
ISSN
2573-0436
2333-9403
2334-0118
Abstract
For material decomposition in spectral computed tomography, the x-ray attenuation coefficient of an unknown material can be decomposed as a combination of a group of basis materials, in order to analyze its material properties. Material decomposition generally leads to amplification of image noise and artifacts. Meanwhile, it is often difficult to acquire the ground truth values of the material basis images, preventing the application of supervised learning-based noise reduction methods. To resolve such problem, we proposed a self-supervised noise and artifact suppression network for spectral computed tomography. The proposed method consists of a projection-domain self-supervised denoising network along with physics-driven constraints to mitigate the secondary artifacts, including a noise modulation item to incorporate the anisotropic noise amplitudes in the projection domain, a sinogram mask image to suppress streaky artifacts and a data fidelity loss item to further mitigate noise and to improve signal accuracy. The performance of the proposed method was evaluated based on both numerical experiment tests and laboratory experiment tests. Results demonstrated that the proposed method has promising performance in noise and artifact suppression for material decomposition in spectral computed tomography. Comprehensive ablation studies were performed to demonstrate the function of each physical constraint.