Low-Dose CT Image Denoising with Improving WGAN and Hybrid Loss Function.

The X-ray radiation from computed tomography (CT) brought us the potential risk. Simply decreasing the dose makes the CT images noisy and diagnostic performance compromised. Here, we develop a novel denoising low-dose CT image method. Our framework is based on an improved generative adversarial network coupling with the hybrid loss function, including the adversarial loss, perceptual loss, sharpness loss, and structural similarity loss. Among the loss function terms, perceptual loss and structural similarity loss are made use of to preserve textural details, and sharpness loss can make reconstruction images clear. The adversarial loss can sharp the boundary regions. The results of experiments show the proposed method can effectively remove noise and artifacts better than the state-of-the-art methods in the aspects of the visual effect, the quantitative measurements, and the texture details.