X-Ray Breast Images Denoising Method Based on the Convolutional Autoencoder

Abstract

Considering the potential risk of X-ray to patients, denoising of low-dose X-ray medical images is imperative. Inspired by deep learning, a convolutional autoencoder method for X-ray breast image denoising is proposed in this paper. First, image symmetry and flip are used to increase the number of images in the public dataset; second, the number of samples is increased further by image cropping segmentation, adding simulated noise, and producing the dataset. Finally, a convolutional autoencoder neural network model is constructed, and clean and noisy images are fed into it to complete the training. The results show that this method effectively removes noise while retaining image details in X-ray breast images, yielding higher peak signal-to-noise ratio and structural similarity index values than classical and novel denoising methods.