Denoising of pediatric low dose abdominal CT using deep learning based algorithm

Objectives: To evaluate standard dose-like computed tomography (CT) images generated by a deep learning method, trained using unpaired low-dose CT (LDCT) and standard-dose CT (SDCT) images. Materials and methods: LDCT (80 kVp, 100 mAs, n = 83) and SDCT (120 kVp, 200 mAs, n = 42) images were divided into training (42 LDCT and 42 SDCT) and validation (41 LDCT) sets. A generative adversarial network framework was used to train unpaired datasets. The trained deep learning method generated virtual SDCT images (VIs) from the original LDCT images (OIs). To test the proposed method, LDCT images (80 kVp, 262 mAs, n = 33) were collected from another CT scanner using iterative reconstruction (IR). Image analyses were performed to evaluate the qualities of VIs in the validation set and to compare the performance of deep learning and IR in the test set. Results: The noise of the VIs was the lowest in both validation and test sets (all p