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Low-dose CT Denoising Using Edge Detection Layer and Perceptual Loss

Low-dose CT imaging is a valid approach to reduce patients’ exposure to X-ray radiation. However, reducing X-ray current increases noise and artifacts in the reconstructed CT images. Deep neural networks have been successfully employed to remove noise from low-dose CT images. This study proposes two novel techniques to boost the performance of a neural network with minimal change in the complexity. First, a non-trainable edge detection layer is proposed that extracts four edge maps from the input image. The layer improves quantitative metrics (PSNR and SSIM) and helps to predict a CT image with more precise boundaries. Next, a joint function of mean-square error and perceptual loss is employed to optimize the network. Using the perceptual loss helps to preserve structural detail; however, it adds check-board artifacts to the output. The proposed joint objective function takes advantage of the benefits offered by each loss. It improves the over-smoothing problem caused by mean-square error and the check-board artifacts caused by perceptual loss.