Design and implementation of convolutional neural network architectures for low-dose CT image noise reduction

An essential objective in low-dose Computed Tomography (CT) imaging is how best to preserve the image quality. While the image quality lowers with reducing the X-ray dosage, improving the quality is crucial. Therefore, a novel method to denoise low-dose CT images has been presented in this thesis. Different from the traditional algorithms which utilize similar shared features of CT images in the spatial domain, the deep learning approaches are suggested for low-dose CT denoising. The proposed algorithm learns an end-to-end mapping from the low-dose CT images for denoising the low-dose CT images. The first method is based on a fully convolutional neural network. The second approach is a deep convolutional neural network architecture consisting of five major sections. The results of two frameworks are compared with the state-of-the-art methods. Several metrics for assessing image quality are applied in this thesis in order to highlight the supremacy of the performed method.