A deep learning approach for virtual contrast enhancement in Contrast Enhanced Spectral Mammography

Contrast Enhanced Spectral Mammography (CESM) is a dual-energy mammographic imaging technique that first requires intravenously administering an iodinated contrast medium. Then, it collects both a low-energy image, comparable to standard mammography, and a high-energy image. The two scans are combined to get a recombined image showing contrast enhancement. Despite CESM diagnostic advantages for breast cancer diagnosis, the use of contrast medium can cause side effects, and CESM also beams patients with a higher radiation dose compared to standard mammography. To address these limitations, this work proposes using deep generative models for virtual contrast enhancement on CESM, aiming to make CESM contrast-free and reduce the radiation dose. Our deep networks, consisting of an autoencoder and two Generative Adversarial Networks, the Pix2Pix, and the CycleGAN, generate synthetic recombined images solely from low-energy images. We perform an extensive quantitative and qualitative analysis of the model's performance, also exploiting radiologists' assessments, on a novel CESM dataset that includes 1138 images. As a further contribution to this work, we make the dataset publicly available. The results show that CycleGAN is the most promising deep network to generate synthetic recombined images, highlighting the potential of artificial intelligence techniques for virtual contrast enhancement in this field.