MPGAN: Multi Pareto Generative Adversarial Network for the denoising and quantitative analysis of low-dose PET images of human brain

Positron emission tomography (PET) imaging is widely used in medical imaging for analyzing neurological disorders and related brain diseases. Usually, full-dose imaging for PET ensures image quality but raises concerns about potential health risks of radiation exposure. The contradiction between reducing radiation exposure and maintaining diagnostic performance can be effectively addressed by reconstructing low-dose PET (L-PET) images to the same high-quality as full-dose (F-PET). This paper introduces the Multi Pareto Generative Adversarial Network (MPGAN) to achieve 3D end-to-end denoising for the L-PET images of human brain. MPGAN consists of two key modules: the diffused multi-round cascade generator ($G_{Dmc}$) and the dynamic Pareto-efficient discriminator ($D_{Ped}$), both of which play a zero-sum game for $n(n\in 1,2,3)$ rounds to ensure the quality of synthesized F-PET images. The Pareto-efficient dynamic discrimination process is introduced in $D_{Ped}$ to adaptively adjust the weights of sub-discriminators for improved discrimination output. We validated the performance of MPGAN using three datasets, including two independent datasets and one mixed dataset, and compared it with 12 recent competing models. Experimental results indicate that the proposed MPGAN provides an effective solution for 3D end-to-end denoising of L-PET images of the human brain, which meets clinical standards and achieves state-of-the-art performance on commonly used metrics.