Detector shifting and deep learning based ring artifact correction method for low‐dose CT

Background In x‐ray computed tomography (CT), the gain inconsistency of detector units leads to ring artifacts in the reconstructed images, seriously destroys the image structure, and is not conducive to image recognition. In addition, to reduce radiation dose and scanning time, especially photon counting CT, low‐dose CT is required, so it is important to reduce the noise and suppress ring artifacts in low‐dose CT images simultaneously. Purpose Deep learning is an effective method to suppress ring artifacts, but there are still residual artifacts in corrected images. And the feature recognition ability of the network for ring artifacts decreases due to the effect of noise in the low‐dose CT images. In this paper, a method is proposed to achieve noise reduction and ring artifact removal simultaneously. Methods To solve these problems, we propose a ring artifact correction method for low‐dose CT based on detector shifting and deep learning in this paper. Firstly, at the CT scanning stage, the detector horizontally shifts randomly at each projection to alleviate the ring artifacts as front processing. Thus, the ring artifacts are transformed into dispersed noise in front processed images. Secondly, deep learning is used for dispersed noise and statistical noise reduction. Results Both simulation and real data experiments are conducted to evaluate the proposed method. Compared to other methods, the results show that the proposed method in this paper has better effect on removing ring artifacts in the low‐dose CT images. Specifically, the RMSEs and SSIMs of the two sets of simulated and experiment data are better compared to the raw images significantly. Conclusions The method proposed in this paper combines detector shifting and deep learning to remove ring artifacts and statistical noise simultaneously. The results show that the proposed method is able to get better performance.