Generating synthetic contrast enhancement from non-contrast chest computed tomography using a generative adversarial network
Jae Won Choi, Yeon Jin Cho, Ji Young Ha, Seul Bi Lee, Seunghyun Lee, Young Hun Choi, Jung‐Eun Cheon, Woo Sun Kim
Abstract
This study aimed to evaluate a deep learning model for generating synthetic contrast-enhanced CT (sCECT) from non-contrast chest CT (NCCT). A deep learning model was applied to generate sCECT from NCCT. We collected three separate data sets, the development set (n = 25) for model training and tuning, test set 1 (n = 25) for technical evaluation, and test set 2 (n = 12) for clinical utility evaluation. In test set 1, image similarity metrics were calculated. In test set 2, the lesion contrast-to-noise ratio of the mediastinal lymph nodes was measured, and an observer study was conducted to compare lesion conspicuity. Comparisons were performed using the paired t-test or Wilcoxon signed-rank test. In test set 1, sCECT showed a lower mean absolute error (41.72 vs 48.74; P < .001), higher peak signal-to-noise ratio (17.44 vs 15.97; P < .001), higher multiscale structural similarity index measurement (0.84 vs 0.81; P < .001), and lower learned perceptual image patch similarity metric (0.14 vs 0.15; P < .001) than NCCT. In test set 2, the contrast-to-noise ratio of the mediastinal lymph nodes was higher in the sCECT group than in the NCCT group (6.15 ± 5.18 vs 0.74 ± 0.69; P < .001). The observer study showed for all reviewers higher lesion conspicuity in NCCT with sCECT than in NCCT alone (P ≤ .001). Synthetic CECT generated from NCCT improves the depiction of mediastinal lymph nodes.