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Updated: May 15, 2026
X-ray Dose Reduction through Adaptive Exposure in Fluoroscopic Imaging
Published on: September 11, 2011
WE-UNet: A Wavelet-enhanced U-Net framework for radiation dose reduction in chest radiography
Emil I Cohen1, Ufaq Khan2, Benjamin Wallace3
1Department of Radiology, MedStar Georgetown University Hospital, Georgetown University, Washington, District of Columbia, USA.
Background:
Reducing ionizing radiation exposure is a critical goal guided by the as-low-as-reasonably-achievable (ALARA) principle. Aggressively lowering radiation doses in radiography, however, amplifies image noise, compromising diagnostic quality.
Purpose:
To evaluate a hybrid Wavelet Enhanced-UNet (WE-UNet) model for denoising chest radiographs (CXRs), enabling substantial radiation dose reduction while maximizing diagnostic utility.
Methods:
A training dataset of 3000 images was created by simulating low-dose conditions (70%-90% dose reduction) on CXRs from a public NIH dataset using Poisson-Gaussian noise modeling. WE-UNet was compared against four established architectures (DnCNN, REDNet, U-Net, MWCNN) using quantitative metrics (MSE, MAE, PSNR, SSIM, edge preservation). Qualitative assessment was performed by two board-certified radiologists in a blinded review.
Results:
Among five architectures, WE-UNet achieved the highest SSIM (0.963 ± 0.007) and edge preservation (0.740 ± 0.116; p < 0.001), while DnCNN showed comparable but not significantly better MSE and PSNR. Denoised images maintained PSNR of 35.23 ± 1.11 dB at 90% dose reduction. In blinded review, radiologist quality ratings for denoised images were statistically equivalent to original full-dose acquisitions (p = 0.029, non-significant after correction).
Conclusions:
WE-UNet outperformed baseline models in structural preservation while maintaining image quality similar to standard-dose acquisitions across dose reductions of 70%-90%, supporting its potential for significant radiation dose reduction.
