Shaolei Zhang

Baoshun Shi, Ke Jiang, Shaolei Zhang et al.

Recent deep learning-based methods have achieved promising performance for computed tomography metal artifact reduction (CTMAR). However, most of them suffer from two limitations: (i) the domain knowledge is not fully embedded into the network training; (ii) metal artifacts lack effective representation models. The aforementioned limitations leave room for further performance improvement. Against these issues, we propose a novel triple domain model-driven CTMAR network, termed as TriDoNet, whose network training exploits triple domain knowledge, i.e., the knowledge of the sinogram, CT image, and metal artifact domains. Specifically, to explore the non-local repetitive streaking patterns of metal artifacts, we encode them as an explicit tight frame sparse representation model with adaptive thresholds. Furthermore, we design a contrastive regularization (CR) built upon contrastive learning to exploit clean CT images and metal-affected images as positive and negative samples, respectively. Experimental results show that our TriDoNet can generate superior artifact-reduced CT images.

Baoshun Shi, Bing Chen, Shaolei Zhang et al.

Low-dose CT (LDCT) is capable of reducing X-ray radiation exposure, but it will potentially degrade image quality, even yields metal artifacts at the case of metallic implants. For simultaneous LDCT reconstruction and metal artifact reduction (LDMAR), existing deep learning-based efforts face two main limitations: i) the network design neglects multi-scale and within-scale information; ii) training a distinct model for each dose necessitates significant storage space for multiple doses. To fill these gaps, we propose a prompt guiding multi-scale adaptive sparse representation-driven network, abbreviated as PMSRNet, for LDMAR task. Specifically, we construct PMSRNet inspired from multi-scale sparsifying frames, and it can simultaneously employ within-scale characteristics and cross-scale complementarity owing to an elaborated prompt guiding scale-adaptive threshold generator (PSATG) and a built multi-scale coefficient fusion module (MSFuM). The PSATG can adaptively capture multiple contextual information to generate more faithful thresholds, achieved by fusing features from local, regional, and global levels. Furthermore, we elaborate a model interpretable dual domain LDMAR framework called PDuMSRNet, and train single model with a prompt guiding strategy for multiple dose levels. We build a prompt guiding module, whose input contains dose level, metal mask and input instance, to provide various guiding information, allowing a single model to accommodate various CT dose settings. Extensive experiments at various dose levels demonstrate that the proposed methods outperform the state-of-the-art LDMAR methods.