Parameter Constrained Transfer Learning for Low Dose PET Image Denoising

Positron emission tomography (PET) is widely used in clinical practice. However, the potential risk of PET-associated radiation dose to patients needs to be minimized. With reduction of the radiation dose, the resultant images may suffer from noise and artifacts which compromises the diagnostic performance. In this paper, we propose a parameter-constrained generative adversarial network with Wasserstein distance and perceptual loss (PC-WGAN) for low-dose PET image denoising. This method makes two main contributions: 1) a PC-WGAN framework is designed to denoise low-dose PET images without compromising structural details; and 2) a transfer learning strategy is developed to train PC-WGAN with parameters being constrained, which has major merits; namely, making the training process of PC-WGAN efficient and improving the quality of denoised images. The experimental results on clinical data show that the proposed network can suppress image noise more effectively while preserving better image fidelity than three selected state-of-the-art methods.