Self-supervised Signal Denoising for Magnetic Particle Imaging

Magnetic particle imaging (MPI) is a medical imaging technology with high resolution and high sensitivity, which tracks the distribution of superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (SPIONs) in the nonlinear response to dynamic excitation at a field-free region. However, various noises distort the signals resulting in a decline in imaging quality. Traditional threshold-based methods cannot remove dynamic noise in MPI signals. Therefore, a self-supervised denoising method is proposed to denoise MPI signals in this study. The approach adopted U-net as the backbone and modified the network for MPI signals. The network is trained using two periods of noisy signals and the shape prior knowledge of the MPI signals is introduced for promoting the convergence of the self-supervised net. The experiments show that the learning-based method can still denoising the MPI signal without labeling data and eventually improve image quality, and our approach can achieve the best performance compared with other self-supervised methods in MPI signal denoising.