Restoring lesions in low-dose computed tomography images of COVID-19 using deep learning
Document Type
Conference Item
Publication Date
1-1-2022
Abstract
The use of Low-dose Computed Tomography (LDCT) in clinical medicine for diagnosis and treatment planning is widespread due to the minimal exposure of patients to radiation. Also, recent studies have confirmed that LDCT is a feasible medical imaging modality for diagnosing COVID-19 cases. In general, X-ray tube current is being reduced to acquire the LDCT images. Reduction of the X-ray flux introduces the Quantum noise into the generated LDCT images and, as a result, it produces visually low-quality CT images. Therefore, it is challenging to differentiate the lesions in the diagnosis of COVID-19 patients using the LDCT images due to low contrast and failure to preserve the subtle structures. Therefore, in this study, we proposed a Deep Learning (DL) model based on the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) for post-processing the LDCT images to enhance their visual quality. In this proposed model, the generator network is designed as a U-net to generate the restored CT images by filter out the noise. Also, the discriminator network follows a patch-GAN model to discriminate the real and generated images while preserving the texture details. The quantitative and qualitative results demonstrated the effectiveness of noise suppression and structure preservation of the proposed DL method. Hence, it provides an acceptable quality improvement for LDCT images to discriminate the lesions for diagnosing the COVID-19 positive cases. © 2022, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
Keywords
Computerized tomography, Deep learning, Diagnosis, Image enhancement, Image reconstruction, Medical imaging, Patient treatment, Quantum noise, Textures, X ray tubes, Computed tomography images, CT Image, De-noising, Dose computed tomographies, Lesion discrimination, Low dose, Low-dose computed tomography, Low-dose computed tomography denoising, Generative adversarial networks
Divisions
Computer,biomedengine
Funders
World Bank-funded Accelerating Higher Education Expansion and Development Operation, Sri Lanka [Grant no. AHEAD/PhD/R1-PART-2/ENG&TECH/105],Universiti Malaya [Grant no. IF015-2021]
Publication Title
IFMBE Proceedings
Volume
86
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
Event Title
6th Kuala Lumpur International Conference on Biomedical Engineering, BioMed 2021
Event Location
Virtual, Online
Event Dates
28-29 July 2021
Event Type
conference