TransCT: Dual-Path Transformer for Low Dose Computed Tomography

Low dose computed tomography (LDCT) has attracted more and more attention in routine clinical diagnosis assessment, therapy planning, etc., which can reduce the dose of X-ray radiation to patients. However, the noise caused by low X-ray exposure degrades the CT image quality and then affects clinical diagnosis accuracy. In this paper, we train a transformer-based neural network to enhance the final CT image quality. To be specific, we first decompose the noisy LDCT image into two parts: high-frequency (HF) and low-frequency (LF) compositions. Then, we extract content features (X-Lc) and latent texture features (X-Lt) from the LF part, as well as HF embeddings (X-Hf) from the HF part. Further, we feed X-Lt and X-Hf into a modified transformer with three encoders and decoders to obtain well-refined HF texture features. After that, we combine these well-refined HF texture features with the pre-extracted X-Lc to encourage the restoration of high-quality LDCT images with the assistance of piecewise reconstruction. Extensive experiments on Mayo LDCT dataset show that our method produces superior results and outperforms other methods.