PET Image Denoising Using a Deep Neural Network Through Fine Tuning

Positron emission tomography (PET) is a functional imaging modality widely used in clinical diagnosis. In this paper, we trained a deep convolutional neural network to improve PET image quality. Perceptual loss based on features derived from a pretrained VGG network, instead of the conventional mean squared error, was employed as the training loss function to preserve image details. As the number of real patient data set for training is limited, we propose to pretrain the network using simulation data and fine-tune the last few layers of the network using real data sets. Results from simulation, real brain, and lung data sets show that the proposed method is more effective in removing noise than the traditional Gaussian filtering method.