Multimodal feature‐guided diffusion model for low‐count PET image denoising

作者：Gengjia Lin, Yuxi Jin, Zhenxing Huang, Zixiang Chen, Haizhou Liu, Chao Zhou, Xu Zhang, Wei Fan, Na Zhang, Dong Liang, Peng Cao, Zhanli Hu · 发表于：Medical Physics · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.1002/mp.17764 · 被引用次数：5 · 研究领域：Image and Signal Denoising Methods、Medical Imaging Techniques and Applications、Advanced Image Processing Techniques

BACKGROUND: To minimize radiation exposure while obtaining high-quality Positron Emission Tomography (PET) images, various methods have been developed to derive standard-count PET (SPET) images from low-count PET (LPET) images. Although deep learning methods have enhanced LPET images, they rarely utilize the rich complementary information from MR images. Even when MR images are used, these methods typically employ early, intermediate, or late fusion strategies to merge features from different CNN streams, failing to fully exploit the complementary properties of multimodal fusion. PURPOSE: In this study, we introduce a novel multimodal feature-guided diffusion model, termed MFG-Diff, designed for the denoising of LPET images with the full utilization of MRI. METHODS: MFG-Diff replaces random Gaussian noise with LPET images and introduces a novel degradation operator to simulate the physical degradation processes of PET imaging. Besides, it uses a novel cross-modal guided restoration network to fully exploit the modality-specific features provided by the LPET and MR images and utilizes a multimodal feature fusion module employing cross-attention mechanisms and positional encoding at multiple feature levels for better feature fusion. RESULTS: Under four counts (2.5%, 5.0%, 10%, and 25%), the images generated by our proposed network showed superior performance compared to those produced by other networks in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations, as well as in statistical ...