QS-ADN: quasi-supervised artifact disentanglement network for low-dose CT image denoising by local similarity among unpaired data

Deep learning has been successfully applied to low-dose CT (LDCT) image denoising for reducing potential radiation risk. However, the widely reported supervised LDCT denoising networks require a training set of paired images, which is expensive to obtain and cannot be perfectly simulated. Unsupervised learning utilizes unpaired data and is highly desirable for LDCT denoising. As an example, an artifact disentanglement network (ADN) relies on unpaired images and obviates the need for supervision but the results of artifact reduction are not as good as those through supervised learning. An important observation is that there is often hidden similarity among unpaired data that can be utilized. This paper introduces a new learning mode, called quasi-supervised learning, to empower ADN for LDCT image denoising. For every LDCT image, the best matched image is first found from an unpaired normal-dose CT (NDCT) dataset. Then, the matched pairs and the corresponding matching degree as prior information are used to construct and train our ADN-type network for LDCT denoising. The proposed method is different from (but compatible with) supervised and semi-supervised learning modes and can be easily implemented by modifying existing networks. The experimental results show that the method is competitive with state-of-the-art methods in terms of noise suppression and contextual fidelity. The code and working dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/ruanyuhui/ADN-QSDL.git.