A deep dictionary network-based foundation model for ultra-low-dose CT denoising

Abstract

Ultra-low-dose computed tomography (ULDCT) reduces radiation exposure but suffers from severe noise that degrades diagnostic image quality. Existing deep learning-based denoising methods are typically trained in an organ-specific fashion, resulting in limited generalization across heterogeneous multi?organ imaging scenarios. Foundation models present a promising all-in-one paradigm for unified multi-organ denoising. However, their architectures suffer from poor interpretability and rely on heuristic training strategies. To address these limitations, we propose an architecture?interpretable foundation model based on the deep dictionary network (DDN) for unified multi-organ ULDCT denoising. Inspired by multilayer sparse representation theory, DDN cascades convolutional sparse coding layers with iterative soft-thresholding, providing inherent architectural interpretability. Furthermore, a dynamic dictionary module and a threshold generation module are embedded within each layer to enhance representation ability. We conduct DDN pre-training on more than one million multi-organ normal-dose CT images by recovering clean images from Gaussian-noised inputs. Sparse regularization is additionally imposed on latent feature representations, guiding the network to learn compact and noise-robust priors. The complete architecture is jointly fine-tuned on multi-organ ULDCT datasets, enabling a single unified model to perform denoising across diverse anatomical regions. Extensive experiments validate that our proposed method achieves state-of-the?art performance and consistently surpasses competing ULDCT methods across all mul