APPARATUS AND METHOD FOR ARTIFACT DETECTION AND CORRECTION USING DEEP LEARNING

A method and apparatus are provided that use deep learning (DL) networks to reduce noise and artifacts in reconstructed computed tomography (CT), positron emission tomography (PET), and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) images. DL networks are used in both the sinogram and image domains. In each domain, a detection network is used to (i) determine if particular types of artifacts are exhibited (e.g., beam-hardening artifact, ring, motion, metal, photon-starvation, windmill, zebra, partial-volume, cupping, truncation, streak artifact, and/or shadowing artifacts), (ii) determine whether the detected artifact can be corrected through a changed scan protocol or image-processing techniques, and (iii) determine whether the detected artifacts are fatal, in which case the scan is stopped short of completion. When the artifacts can be corrected, corrective measures are taken through a changed scan protocol or through image processing to reduce the artifacts (e.g., convolutional neural network can be trained to perform the image processing).