Cross-modality image translation: CT image synthesis of MR brain images using multi generative network with perceptual supervision

Background: Computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are the mainstream imaging technologies for clinical practice. CT imaging can reveal high-quality anatomical and physiopathological structures, especially bone tissue, for clinical diagnosis. MRI provides high resolution in soft tissue and is sensitive to lesions. CT combined with MRI diagnosis has become a regular image-guided radiation treatment plan. Methods: In this paper, to reduce the dose of radiation exposure in CT examinations and ameliorate the limitations of traditional virtual imaging technologies, we propose a Generative MRI-to-CT transformation method with structural perceptual supervision. Even though structural reconstruction is structurally misaligned in the MRI-CT dataset registration, our proposed method can better align structural information of synthetic CT (sCT) images to input MRI images while simulating the modality of CT in the MRI-to-CT cross-modality transformation. Results: We retrieved a total of 3416 brain MRI-CT paired images as the train/test dataset, including 1366 train images of 10 patients and 2050 test images of 15 patients. Several methods (the baseline methods and the proposed method) were evaluated by the HU difference map, HU distribution, and various similarity metrics, including the mean absolute error (MAE), structural similarity index (SSIM), peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), and normalized cross-correlation (NCC). In our quantitative experimental results, the proposed method achieves the lowest MAE mean of 0.147, highest PSNR mean of 19.27, and NCC mean of 0.431 in the overall CT test dataset. Conclusions: In conclusion, both qualitative and quantitative results of synthetic CT validate that the proposed method can preserve higher similarity of structural information of the bone tissue of target CT than the baseline methods. Furthermore, the proposed method provides better HU intensity reconstruction for simulating the distribution of the CT modality. The experimental estimation indicates that the proposed method is worth further investigation.