Training low dose CT denoising network without high quality reference data

Objective. Currently, the field of low-dose CT (LDCT) denoising is dominated by supervised learning based methods, which need perfectly registered pairs of LDCT and its corresponding clean reference image (normal-dose CT). However, training without clean labels is more practically feasible and significant, since it is clinically impossible to acquire a large amount of these paired samples. In this paper, a self-supervised denoising method is proposed for LDCT imaging. Approach. The proposed method does not require any clean images. In addition, the perceptual loss is used to achieve data consistency in feature domain during the denoising process. Attention blocks used in decoding phase can help further improve the image quality. Main results. In the experiments, we validate the effectiveness of our proposed self-supervised framework and compare our method with several state-of-the-art supervised and unsupervised methods. The results show that our proposed model achieves competitive performance in both qualitative and quantitative aspects to other methods. Significance. Our framework can be directly applied to most denoising scenarios without collecting pairs of training data, which is more flexible for real clinical scenario.