Image Decomposition Algorithm for Dual-Energy Computed Tomography via Fully Convolutional Network

BACKGROUND: Dual-energy computed tomography (DECT) has been widely used due to improved substances identification from additional spectral information. The quality of material-specific image produced by DECT attaches great importance to the elaborated design of the basis material decomposition method. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this work is to develop and validate a data-driven algorithm for the image-based decomposition problem. METHODS: A deep neural net, consisting of a fully convolutional net (FCN) and a fully connected net, is proposed to solve the material decomposition problem. The former net extracts the feature representation of input reconstructed images, and the latter net calculates the decomposed basic material coefficients from the joint feature vector. The whole model was trained and tested using a modified clinical dataset. RESULTS: The proposed FCN delivers image with about 60% smaller bias and 70% lower standard deviation than the competing algorithms, suggesting its better material separation capability. Moreover, FCN still yields excellent performance in case of photon noise. CONCLUSIONS: Our deep cascaded network features high decomposition accuracies and noise robust property. The experimental results have shown the strong function fitting ability of the deep neural network. Deep learning paradigm could be a promising way to solve the nonlinear problem in DECT.