Fast EPRI Imaging Based on 3MNet Denoising Network

Electron paramagnetic resonance imaging (EPRI) is an advanced technique for oxygen imaging. The current bottleneck in EPRI is the slow scanning speed, due to the fact that the projection signal at each angle needs to be repeated thousands of times to suppress random noise. One way to achieve fast scanning is to reduce the number of repeated projection signal acquisitions; however, this, in turn, reduces the signal-to-noise ratio of the projection signal and results in a noisy reconstructed image. To effectively suppress the noise in the reconstructed image, this study proposes a multi-channel, multi-scale, multi-concatenation, and convolutional network (3MNet) based image denoising network to achieve high accuracy and fast EPRI imaging. The proposed network consists of three sub-networks. The first sub-network is an attention-based convolutional network, whose output feature images are stitched with the input images to form the input of the back-end network. The second sub-network is a three-channel convolutional network. Finally, the third sub-network is a multi-scale convolutional network. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed 3MNet network can achieve high accuracy in denoising EPRI images and fast imaging.