Low-dose computed tomography image reconstruction via a multistage convolutional neural network with autoencoder perceptual loss network

Background: Computed tomography (CT) is widely used in medical diagnoses due to its ability to non-invasively detect the internal structures of the human body. However, CT scans with normal radiation doses can cause irreversible damage to patients. The radiation exposure is reduced with low-dose CT (LDCT), although considerable speckle noise and streak artifacts in CT images and even structural deformation may result, significantly undermining its diagnostic capability. Methods: This paper proposes a multistage network framework which gradually divides the entire process into 2-staged sub-networks to complete the task of image reconstruction. Specifically, a dilated residual convolutional neural network (DRCNN) was used to denoise the LDCT image. Then, the learned context information was combined with the channel attention subnet, which retains local information, to preserve the structural details and features of the image and textural information. To obtain recognizable characteristic details, we introduced a novel self-calibration module (SCM) between the 2 stages to reweight the local features, which realizes the complementation of information at different stages while refining feature information. In addition, we also designed an autoencoder neural network, using a self-supervised learning scheme to train a perceptual loss neural network specifically for CT images. Results: We evaluated the diagnostic quality of the results and performed ablation experiments on the loss function and network structure modules to verify each module's effectiveness in the network. Our proposed network architecture obtained high peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), structural similarity index measure (SSIM), and visual information fidelity (VIF) values in terms of quantitative evaluation. In the analysis of qualitative results, our network structure maintained a better balance between eliminating image noise and preserving image details. Experimental results showed that our proposed network structure obtained better metrics and visual evaluation. Conclusions: This study proposed a new LDCT image reconstruction method by combining autoencoder perceptual loss networks with multistage convolutional neural networks (MSCNN). Experimental results showed that the newly proposed method has performance than other methods.