Patent ID: 11361431

Abstract:
A method of reducing radiation dose for radiology imaging modalities and nuclear medicine by using a convolutional network to generate a standard-dose nuclear medicine image from low-dose nuclear medicine image, where the network includes N convolution neural network (CNN) stages, where each stage includes M convolution layers having K×K kernels, where the network further includes an encoder-decoder structure having symmetry concatenate connections between corresponding stages, downsampling using pooling and upsampling using bilinear interpolation between the stages, where the network extracts multi-scale and high-level features from the low-dose image to simulate a high-dose image, and adding concatenate connections to the low-dose image to preserve local information and resolution of the high-dose image, the high-dose image includes a dose reduction factor (DRF) equal to 1 of a radio tracer in a patient, the low-dose PET image includes a DRF of at least 4 of the radio tracer in the patient.