Enhancing Medical Image Quality Using Fractional Order Denoising Integrated with Transfer Learning

In medical imaging, noise can significantly obscure critical details, complicating diagnosis and treatment. Traditional denoising techniques often struggle to maintain a balance between noise reduction and detail preservation. To address this challenge, we propose an “Efficient Transfer-Learning-Based Fractional Order Image Denoising Approach in Medical Image Analysis (ETLFOD)” method. Our approach uniquely integrates transfer learning with fractional order techniques, leveraging pre-trained models such as DenseNet121 to adapt to the specific needs of medical image denoising. This method enhances denoising performance while preserving essential image details. The ETLFOD model has demonstrated superior performance compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) techniques. For instance, our DenseNet121 model achieved an accuracy of 98.01%, precision of 98%, and recall of 98%, significantly outperforming traditional denoising methods. Specific results include a 95% accuracy, 98% precision, 99% recall, and 96% F1-score for MRI brain datasets, and an 88% accuracy, 91% precision, 95% recall, and 88% F1-score for COVID-19 lung data. X-ray pneumonia results in the lung CT dataset showed a 92% accuracy, 97% precision, 98% recall, and 93% F1-score. It is important to note that while we report performance metrics in this paper, the primary evaluation of our approach is based on the comparison of original noisy images with the denoised outputs, ensuring a focus on image quality enhancement rather than classification performance.