Wavelet subband discriminator for efficient unsupervised chest X-ray image restoration

Abstract

BackgroundChest X-ray (CXR) images are commonly used to show the internal structure of the human body without invasive intervention. The quality of CXR is an important factor as it affects the accuracy of a clinical diagnosis. Unfortunately, it is difficult to always get good quality CXR scans due to noises and scatters. PurposeRecently, wavelet directional CycleGAN (WavCycleGAN) has shown promising results in image restoration tasks by removing noise and artifacts without sacrificing high-frequency components of the input image. Unfortunately, WavCycleGAN directly reconstructs wavelet directional images that require a wavelet transform in both the training and test phases, resulting in additional processing steps and unnatural artifacts originating from the wavelet domain image. In addition, WavCycleGAN can only process artifact-related subbands, so it is difficult to apply WavCycleGAN when different levels of artifacts are present in all subbands. To address this, here we present a novel unsupervised CXR image restoration scheme with similar or even better artifact removal performance than WavCycleGAN in spite of wavelet transform being only applied in the training phase. MethodsWe introduce a novel wavelet subband discriminator which can be combined with CycleGAN or switchable CycleGAN, where wavelet transform is applied only in the training phase for discriminators to match the distribution of wavelet subband components. In our framework, the image restoration network can be still applied in the image domain to prevent unnatural artifacts of the wavelet domain image with the help of the image-domain cycle-consistency loss. In addition, using wavelet subband discriminator makes it possible to remove artifacts in all subbands by utilizing frequency-specific wavelet subband discriminators. ResultsThrough extensive experiments for noise and scatter removal in CXRs, we confirm that our method provides competitive performance compared to existing approaches without additional processing steps in the test phase. Furthermore, we show that our wavelet subband discriminator combined with the switchable CycleGAN can provide the flexibility by generating different levels of artifact removal. ConclusionsThe proposed wavelet subband discriminator can be combined with the existing CycleGAN or switchable CycleGAN structures to construct an efficient unsupervised CXR image reconstruction. The advantage of our wavelet subband discriminator-based CXR image restoration is that, unlike traditional WavCycleGAN, it does not require any additional processing steps in the testing phase and does not generate unnatural artifacts originating from the wavelet domain image. We believe that our wavelet subband discriminator can be applied to various CXR image applications.