# MANAS: Multi-Scale and Multi-Level Neural Architecture Search for Low-Dose CT Denoising

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.12995 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12995/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 44 of its 78 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Mar 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [Photo-Realistic Single Image Super-Resolution Using a Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04802/) (2016)
- [DARTS: Differentiable Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.09055/) (2018)
- [Enhanced Deep Residual Networks for Single Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02921/) (2017)
- [Neural Architecture Search with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01578/) (2016)
- [Beyond a Gaussian Denoiser: Residual Learning of Deep CNN for Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03981/) (2016)
- [ESRGAN: Enhanced Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00219/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Architectures for Scalable Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07012/) (2017)
- [Deep Image Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10925/) (2017)
- [ProxylessNAS: Direct Neural Architecture Search on Target Task and Hardware](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00332/) (2018)
- [Large-Scale Evolution of Image Classifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01041/) (2017)
- [NAS-FPN: Learning Scalable Feature Pyramid Architecture for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07392/) (2019)
- [Designing Neural Network Architectures using Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.02167/) (2016)
- [PC-DARTS: Partial Channel Connections for Memory-Efficient Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05737/) (2019)
- [Auto-DeepLab: Hierarchical Neural Architecture Search for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02985/) (2019)
- [Low-Dose CT with a Residual Encoder-Decoder Convolutional Neural Network (RED-CNN)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.00288/) (2017)
- [Low Dose CT Image Denoising Using a Generative Adversarial Network with Wasserstein Distance and Perceptual Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00961/) (2017)
- [Fair DARTS: Eliminating Unfair Advantages in Differentiable Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12126/) (2019)
- [Genetic CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01513/) (2017)
- [DARTS+: Improved Differentiable Architecture Search with Early Stopping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.06035/) (2019)
- [Evolving Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00548/) (2017)
- [Learning Dynamic Routing for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10401/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Hypernetwork-based Personalized Federated Learning for Multi-Institutional CT Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.03709/) (2022)
- [Energizing Federated Learning via Filter-Aware Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12049/) (2023)
- [HF-Fed: Hierarchical based customized Federated Learning Framework for X-Ray Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.17780/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Lowering the radiation dose in computed tomography (CT) can greatly reduce the potential risk to public health. However, the reconstructed images from the dose-reduced CT or low-dose CT (LDCT) suffer from severe noise, compromising the subsequent diagnosis and analysis. Recently, convolutional neural networks have achieved promising results in removing noise from LDCT images; the network architectures used are either handcrafted or built on top of conventional networks such as ResNet and U-Net. Recent advance on neural network architecture search (NAS) has proved that the network architecture has a dramatic effect on the model performance, which indicates that current network architectures for LDCT may be sub-optimal. Therefore, in this paper, we make the first attempt to apply NAS to LDCT and propose a multi-scale and multi-level NAS for LDCT denoising, termed MANAS. On the one hand, the proposed MANAS fuses features extracted by different scale cells to capture multi-scale image structural details. On the other hand, the proposed MANAS can search a hybrid cell- and network-level structure for better performance. Extensively experimental results on three different dose levels demonstrate that the proposed MANAS can achieve better performance in terms of preserving image structural details than several state-of-the-art methods. In addition, we also validate the effectiveness of the multi-scale and multi-level architecture for LDCT denoising.