Noise modelling of perfusion CT images for robust hemodynamic parameter estimations

Objective. The radiation dose of cerebral perfusion computed tomography (CPCT) imaging can be reduced by lowering the milliampere-second or kilovoltage peak. However, dose reduction can decrease image quality due to excessive x-ray quanta fluctuation and reduced detector signal relative to system electronic noise, thereby influencing the accuracy of hemodynamic parameters for patients with acute stroke. Existing low-dose CPCT denoising methods, which mainly focus on specific temporal and spatial prior knowledge in low-dose CPCT images, not take the noise distribution characteristics of low-dose CPCT images into consideration. In practice, the noise of low-dose CPCT images can be much more complicated. This study first investigates the noise properties in low-dose CPCT images and proposes a perfusion deconvolution model based on the noise properties. Approach. To characterize the noise distribution in CPCT images properly, we analyze noise properties in low-dose CPCT images and find that the intra-frame noise distribution may vary in the different areas and the inter-frame noise also may vary in low-dose CPCT images. Thus, we attempt the first-ever effort to model CPCT noise with a non-independent and identical distribution (i.i.d.) mixture-of-Gaussians (MoG) model for noise assumption. Furthermore, we integrate the noise modeling strategy into a perfusion deconvolution model and present a novel perfusion deconvolution method by using self-relative structural similarity information and MoG model (named as SR-MoG) to estimate the hemodynamic parameters accurately. In the presented SR-MoG method, the self-relative structural similarity information is obtained from preprocessed low-dose CPCT images. Main results. The results show that the presented SR-MoG method can achieve promising gains over the existing deconvolution approaches. In particular, the average root-mean-square error (RMSE) of cerebral blood flow (CBF), cerebral blood volume, and mean transit time was improved by 40.3%, 69.1%, and 40.8% in the digital phantom study, and the average RMSE of CBF can be improved by 81.0% in the clinical data study, compared with tensor total variation regularization deconvolution method. Significance. The presented SR-MoG method can estimate high-accuracy hemodynamic parameters andachieve promising gains over the existing deconvolution approaches.