Neural Network for Data Preprocessing in Computed Tomography

Andrei V. Yamaev, Marina V. Chukalina, Dmitry P. Nikolaev, Aleksander V. Sheshkus, Alexey I. Chulichkov

Abstract: We propose a lightweight noise-canceling filtering neural network that implements the filtering stage in the algorithm for tomographic reconstruction of convolution and backprojection (Filtered BackProjection—FBP). We substantiate the neural network architecture, selected on the basis of the possibility of approximating the ramp filtering operation with sufficient accuracy. The network performance has been demonstrated using synthetic data that mimics low-exposure tomographic projections. The quantum nature of X-ray radiation, the exposure time of one frame, and the nonlinear response of the ionizing radiation detector are taken into account when generating the synthetic data. The reconstruction time using the proposed network is 11 times shorter than that of the heavy networks selected for comparison, with the reconstruction quality in the $$SSIM$$ metric above 0.9.