A Task-Prompt-Guided Dual-Decoder Framework with Large Language Models for Multi-Phase Contrast CT Synthesis from...

Synthesizing multi-phase contrast-enhanced CT images from non-contrast CT (NCCT) may provide complementary phase-specific cues for preliminary assessment. After rigorous clinical validation, such images could provide clinical decision support or aid diagnostic triage by identifying cases that warrant further acquired contrast-enhanced CT (CECT) work-up; they are not intended to replace acquired CECT. Arterial-phase (ART) and portal-venous-phase (PV) images share anatomical structures but exhibit distinct enhancement patterns and intensity distributions, which makes simultaneous multi-phase synthesis challenging for conventional single-decoder models. We propose a task-prompt-guided dual-decoder framework that combines a shared Swin Transformer encoder, two phase-specific decoders, learnable task prompts initialized from Qwen3-8B semantic representations, two phase-specific adversarial discriminators, and an independent ART/PV domain classifier. The shared encoder extracts phase-invariant anatomical features, whereas the two decoders independently model ART- and PV-specific enhancement. The Qwen3-derived prompt vectors provide phase-aware initialization and subsequently adapt through prompt-feature interaction at the bottleneck. Experiments on a single-center dataset of 86 patients show improved whole-image and lesion-focused PSNR, SSIM, MSE, and PCC relative to Pix2pix and MedGAN. Controlled ablation experiments indicate the benefits of Qwen3-based prompt initialization, subsequent prompt adaptation, and correct prompt-decoder correspondence; a reduced baseline additionally assesses the combined removal of LLTP and ART/PV domain classification. In a downstream slice-level four-class focal liver lesion classification experiment, synthetic multiphase input improved accuracy from 71.65% with NCCT alone to 85.04%, compared with 91.34% for acquired multiphase CT. These findings provide a proof of concept for LLM-guided multi-phase CT synthesis, although external validation, clinically oriented safety assessment, and reader studies remain necessary before clinical use for decision support or diagnostic triage.