Improvement of signal and noise performance using single image super-resolution based on deep learning in single photon-emission computed tomography imaging system

Abstract

Because single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) is one of the widely used nuclear medicine imaging systems, it is extremely important to acquire high-quality images for diagnosis. In this study, we designed a super-resolution (SR) technique using dense block-based deep convolutional neural network (CNN) and evaluated the algorithm on real SPECT phantom images. To acquire the phantom images, a real SPECT system using a99mTc source and two physical phantoms was used. To confirm the image quality, the noise properties and visual quality metric evaluation parameters were calculated. The results demonstrate that our proposed method delivers a more valid SR improvement by using dense block-based deep CNNs as compared to conventional reconstruction techniques. In particular, when the proposed method was used, the quantitative performance was improved from 1.2 to 5.0 times compared to the result of using the conventional iterative reconstruction. Here, we confirmed the effects on the image quality of the resulting SR image, and our proposed technique was shown to be effective for nuclear medicine imaging.