Improved MR to CT synthesis for PET/MR attenuation correction using Imitation Learning

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel deep learning framework for synthesizing pseudo CT images from MRI data that optimizes PET reconstruction quality rather than just intensity similarity, improving PET attenuation correction.

Contribution

It proposes a multi-hypothesis deep learning model with a metric-loss focused on PET residuals, enhancing PET reconstruction accuracy in PET/MRI attenuation correction.

Findings

Improved PET reconstruction residuals with the proposed method

Less accurate pCT in intensity metrics compared to baseline

Significant reduction in PET residuals compared to baseline

Abstract

The ability to synthesise Computed Tomography images - commonly known as pseudo CT, or pCT - from MRI input data is commonly assessed using an intensity-wise similarity, such as an L2-norm between the ground truth CT and the pCT. However, given that the ultimate purpose is often to use the pCT as an attenuation map ($\mu$-map) in Positron Emission Tomography Magnetic Resonance Imaging (PET/MRI), minimising the error between pCT and CT is not necessarily optimal. The main objective should be to predict a pCT that, when used as $\mu$-map, reconstructs a pseudo PET (pPET) which is as close as possible to the gold standard PET. To this end, we propose a novel multi-hypothesis deep learning framework that generates pCTs by minimising a combination of the pixel-wise error between pCT and CT and a proposed metric-loss that itself is represented by a convolutional neural network (CNN) and aims to minimise subsequent PET residuals. The model is trained on a database of 400 paired MR/CT/PET image slices. Quantitative results show that the network generates pCTs that seem less accurate when evaluating the Mean Absolute Error on the pCT (69.68HU) compared to a baseline CNN (66.25HU), but lead to significant improvement in the PET reconstruction - 115a.u. compared to baseline 140a.u.