Noise2Match: Self-Supervised Low-Dose CT Denoising via Adaptive Inter-Slice Matching

Langrui Zhou, Guang Li, Xinyu Huang, Ziteng Zhou, Zuyang Huang +3

With the rapid development of deep learning, supervised convolutional neural network methods have greatly improved the performance of low-dose computed tomography (CT) denoising. However, they require paired noisy-clean training data, which is difficult to obtain in practice. Some classic self-supervised denoising methods rely on the assumption of pixel-wise independent noise, making them ineffective for correlated noise in low-dose CT (LDCT) images. Considering the high similarity and weaker noise correlation between adjacent CT slices, several recently proposed self-supervised methods use adjacent LDCT slices for training. Nevertheless, these approaches fail to effectively account for the non-rigid misalignment between slices caused by anatomical variation, hindering them from satisfying the equal-mean condition required by the classic Noise2Noise framework. In this paper, we propose Noise2Match, a self-supervised LDCT denoising method based on adaptive inter-slice matching. Noise2Match introduces an inter-slice matching network to model the label transition process between adjacent slices, and then applies correction to the denoiser's outputs to better satisfy the equal-mean…