APNet: Adaptive projection network for medical image denoising.

Background: In clinical medicine, low-dose radiographic image noise reduces the quality of the detected image features and may have a negative impact on disease diagnosis.

Objective: In this study, Adaptive Projection Network (APNet) is proposed to reduce noise from low-dose medical images.

Methods: APNet is developed based on an architecture of the U-shaped network to capture multi-scale data and achieve end-to-end image denoising. To adaptively calibrate important features during information transmission, a residual block of the dual attention method throughout the encoding and decoding phases is integrated. A non-local attention module to separate the noise and texture of the image details by using image adaptive projection during the feature fusion.

Results: To verify the effectiveness of APNet, experiments on lung CT images with synthetic noise are performed, and the results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms recent methods in both quantitative index and visual quality. In addition, the denoising experiment on the dental CT image is also carried out and it verifies that the network has a certain generalization.

Conclusions: The proposed APNet is an effective method that can reduce image noise and preserve the required image details in low-dose radiographic images.