DAGAN: A GAN Network for Image Denoising of Medical Images Using Deep Learning of Residual Attention Structures

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Medical images are susceptible to noise and artifacts, so denoising becomes an essential pre-processing technique for further medical image processing stages. We propose a medical image denoising method based on dual-attention mechanism for generative adversarial networks (GANs). The method is based on a GAN model with fused residual structure and introduces a global skip-layer connection structure to balance the learning ability of the shallow and deep networks. The generative network uses a residual module containing channel and spatial attention for efficient extraction of CT image features. The mean square error loss and perceptual loss are introduced to construct a composite loss function to optimize the model loss function, which helps to improve the image generation effect of the model. Experimental results on the LUNA dataset and “the 2016 Low-Dose CT Grand Challenge” dataset show that DAGAN achieves the best results in root mean square error (RMSE), structural similarity (SSIM) and peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) when compared to the state-of-the-art methods. In particular, PSNR reaches 31.2308 dB and 27.5265 dB, SSIM reaches 0.9115 and 0.7895, while RMSE is 0.0082 and 0.0112, respectively. This indicates that our method performs better than the state-of-the-art methods in the task of CT image denoising.