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Under the global pandemic of COVID-19, the use of artificial intelligence to analyze chest X-ray (CXR) image for COVID-19 diagnosis and patient triage is becoming important. Unfortunately, due to the emergent nature of the COVID-19 pandemic, a systematic collection of CXR data set for deep neural network training is difficult. To address this problem, here we propose a patch-based convolutional neural network approach with a relatively small number of trainable parameters for COVID-19 diagnosis. The proposed method is inspired by our statistical analysis of the potential imaging biomarkers of the CXR radiographs. Experimental results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance and provides clinically interpretable saliency maps, which are useful for COVID-19 diagnosis and patient triage.

A model-based dynamic MRI called k-t BLAST/SENSE has drawn significant attention from the MR imaging community because of its improved spatio-temporal resolution. Recently, we showed that the k-t BLAST/SENSE corresponds to the special case of a new dynamic MRI algorithm called k-t FOCUSS that is optimal from a compressed sensing perspective. The main contribution of this article is an extension of k-t FOCUSS to a more general framework with prediction and residual encoding, where the prediction provides an initial estimate and the resid-

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Purpose: Due to the potential risk of inducing cancer, radiation exposure by X-ray CT devices should be reduced for routine patient scanning. However, in low-dose X-ray CT, severe artifacts typically occur due to photon starvation, beam hardening, and other causes, all of which decrease the reliability of the diagnosis. Thus, a high-quality reconstruction method from low-dose X-ray CT data has become a major research topic in the CT community. Conventional model-based de-noising approaches are, however, computationally very expensive, and image-domain de-noising approaches cannot readily remove CT-specific noise patterns. To tackle these problems, we want to develop a new low-dose X-ray CT algorithm based on a deep-learning approach. Method: We propose an algorithm which uses a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) which is applied to the wavelet transform coefficients of low-dose CT images. More specifically, using a directional wavelet transform to extract the directional component of artifacts and exploit the intra-and inter-band correlations, our deep network can effectively suppress CT-specific noise. In addition, our CNN is designed with a residual learning architecture for faster network training and better performance. Results: Experimental results confirm that the proposed algorithm effectively removes complex noise patterns from CT images derived from a reduced X-ray dose. In addition, we show that the wavelet-domain CNN is efficient when used to remove noise from low-dose CT compared to existing approaches. Our results were rigorously evaluated by several radiologists at the Mayo Clinic and won second place at the 2016 "Low-Dose CT Grand Challenge." Conclusions: To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first deep-learning architecture for lowdose CT reconstruction which has been rigorously evaluated and proven to be effective. In addition, the proposed algorithm, in contrast to existing model-based iterative reconstruction (MBIR) methods, has considerable potential to benefit from large data sets. Therefore, we believe that the proposed algorithm opens a new direction in the area of low-dose CT research.