Computed tomography from a low radiation dose (LDCT) is challenging due to
high noise in the projection data. Popular approaches for LDCT image
reconstruction are two-stage methods, typically consisting of the filtered
backprojection (FBP) algorithm followed by a neural network for LDCT image
enhancement. Two-stage methods are attractive for their simplicity and
potential for computational efficiency, typically requiring only a single FBP
and a neural network forward pass for inference. However, the best
reconstruction quality is currently achieved by unrolled iterative methods
(Learned Primal-Dual and ItNet), which are more complex and thus have a higher
computational cost for training and inference. We propose a method combining
the simplicity and efficiency of two-stage methods with state-of-the-art
reconstruction quality. Our strategy utilizes a neural network pretrained for
Gaussian noise removal from natural grayscale images, fine-tuned for LDCT image
enhancement. We call this method FBP-DTSGD (Domain and Task Shifted Gaussian
Denoisers) as the fine-tuning is a task shift from Gaussian denoising to
enhancing LDCT images and a domain shift from natural grayscale to LDCT images.
An ablation study with three different pretrained Gaussian denoisers indicates
that the performance of FBP-DTSGD does not depend on a specific denoising
architecture, suggesting future advancements in Gaussian denoising could
benefit the method. The study also shows that pretraining on natural images
enhances LDCT reconstruction quality, especially with limited training data.
Notably, pretraining involves no additional cost, as existing pretrained models
are used. The proposed method currently holds the top mean position in the
LoDoPaB-CT challenge.