CT image quality enhancement via a dual-channel neural network with jointing denoising and super-resolution

In recent years, computed tomography (CT) has been widely used in various clinical diagnosis. Given potential health risks bring by the X-ray radiation, the major objective of the current research is to achieve high-quality CT imaging while reducing X-ray radiation. However, most existing studies on low-dose CT image super-resolution reconstruction do not focus on the interaction between the denoising task and the super-resolution task. In this paper, we propose a dual-channel joint learning framework to accurately reconstruct high-resolution CT images from low-resolution CT images. Unlike the previous cascaded models which directly combine the denoising network and the super-resolution network, our method can process the denoising reconstruction and the super-resolution reconstruction in parallel. Additionally, we design a filter gate module that can filter features from the denoising branch and highlight important features which can benefit the super-resolution task. We evaluate the performance of our method in medical image enhancement by testing on the 2016 Low-Dose CT Grand Challenge dataset and the piglet dataset. The experimental results show that the proposed network is superior to other state-of-the-art methods in terms of both peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity index (SSIM). We also demonstrate that our method can better remove noise and recover details. Furthermore, the method achieves competitive results not only for super-resolution reconstruction of low-dose CT, but also for super-resolution reconstruction of sparse-view CT.