Anatomical-Guided Attention Enhances Unsupervised PET Image Denoising Performance
This addresses the problem of reducing PET scan times and tracer doses for patients, offering a practical improvement over supervised methods that require paired data, though it is incremental as it builds on existing unsupervised and guided denoising techniques.
The paper tackles unsupervised denoising of PET images by proposing an anatomical-guided attention method, achieving state-of-the-art performance with a peak signal-to-noise ratio of 27.92 dB and structural similarity of 0.886 in simulations, and reducing scan times and tracer doses by using 1/10th of full counts in preclinical and clinical studies.
Although supervised convolutional neural networks (CNNs) often outperform conventional alternatives for denoising positron emission tomography (PET) images, they require many low- and high-quality reference PET image pairs. Herein, we propose an unsupervised 3D PET image denoising method based on an anatomical information-guided attention mechanism. The proposed magnetic resonance-guided deep decoder (MR-GDD) utilizes the spatial details and semantic features of MR-guidance image more effectively by introducing encoder-decoder and deep decoder subnetworks. Moreover, the specific shapes and patterns of the guidance image do not affect the denoised PET image, because the guidance image is input to the network through an attention gate. In a Monte Carlo simulation of [$^{18}$F]fluoro-2-deoxy-D-glucose (FDG), the proposed method achieved the highest peak signal-to-noise ratio and structural similarity (27.92 $\pm$ 0.44 dB/0.886 $\pm$ 0.007), as compared with Gaussian filtering (26.68 $\pm$ 0.10 dB/0.807 $\pm$ 0.004), image guided filtering (27.40 $\pm$ 0.11 dB/0.849 $\pm$ 0.003), deep image prior (DIP) (24.22 $\pm$ 0.43 dB/0.737 $\pm$ 0.017), and MR-DIP (27.65 $\pm$ 0.42 dB/0.879 $\pm$ 0.007). Furthermore, we experimentally visualized the behavior of the optimization process, which is often unknown in unsupervised CNN-based restoration problems. For preclinical (using [$^{18}$F]FDG and [$^{11}$C]raclopride) and clinical (using [$^{18}$F]florbetapir) studies, the proposed method demonstrates state-of-the-art denoising performance while retaining spatial resolution and quantitative accuracy, despite using a common network architecture for various noisy PET images with 1/10th of the full counts. These results suggest that the proposed MR-GDD can reduce PET scan times and PET tracer doses considerably without impacting patients.