Synthesizing Contrast-enhanced Computed Tomography Images with an Improved Conditional Generative Adversarial Network

Contrast-enhanced computed tomography (CE-CT) images are used extensively for the diagnosis of liver cancer in clinical practice. Compared with the non-contrast CT (NC-CT) images (CT scans without injection), the CE-CT images are obtained after injecting the contrast, which will increase physical burden of patients. To handle the limitation, we proposed an improved conditional generative adversarial network (improved cGAN) to generate CE-CT images from non-contrast CT images. In the improved cGAN, we incorporate a pyramid pooling module and an elaborate feature fusion module to the generator to improve the capability of encoder in capturing multi-scale semantic features and prevent the dilution of information in the process of decoding. We evaluate the performance of our proposed method on a contrast-enhanced CT dataset including three phases of CT images, (i.e., non-contrast image, CE-CT images in arterial and portal venous phases). Experimental results suggest that the proposed method is superior to existing GAN-based models in quantitative and qualitative results.