Denoise X: Self-Supervised U-Net for Quantum Mottle Suppression in Chest Radiography

Abstract

Deep learning for medical image restoration is often constrained by the need for paired training data. Acquiring perfectly registered clean-noisy radiographs in vivo is impractical due to patient motion and radiation-dose limits. To address this, we employ a self-supervised Noise2Noise paradigm that trains on independently corrupted observations without paired clean images. We propose Denoise X, a lightweight self-supervised U-Net model (7.79M parameters) for suppressing quantum mottle and electronic readout noise in low-dose chest radiographs. It is trained on the NIH ChestX-ray14 dataset (112,120 images) using a stochastic Poisson-Gaussian noise simulator. Zero-shot evaluation on the unseen Montgomery County dataset achieved a PSNR of 36.09 dB and SSIM of 0.8806, outperforming the Bilateral filter while preserving high-frequency anatomical details. Using patch-wise inference, Denoise X processes native-resolution chest radiographs in ~2.2 s per image on a Tesla P100 GPU. Cross-domain evaluation on the Shenzhen dataset achieved 36.44 dB PSNR and 0.9099 SSIM, showing strong generalization. For resource-constrained deployment, the model was converted into a 31.16 MB ONNX model for efficient CPU inference on non-DICOM images.