Synthesizing Multi-Tracer PET Images for Alzheimer's Disease Patients using a 3D Unified Anatomy-aware Cyclic Adversarial Network

TL;DR

This paper introduces UCAN, a 3D unified model that synthesizes multi-tracer PET images for Alzheimer's disease from single-tracer scans, reducing the need for multiple tracers and associated costs.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel 3D unified anatomy-aware cyclic adversarial network that can generate multiple PET tracers simultaneously from a single tracer, improving efficiency over previous fixed domain translation methods.

Findings

Achieved less than 15% NMSE across all tracers.

Successfully generated high-quality multi-tracer PET volumes.

Demonstrated feasibility on a multi-tracer PET dataset.

Abstract

Positron Emission Tomography (PET) is an important tool for studying Alzheimer's disease (AD). PET scans can be used as diagnostics tools, and to provide molecular characterization of patients with cognitive disorders. However, multiple tracers are needed to measure glucose metabolism (18F-FDG), synaptic vesicle protein (11C-UCB-J), and $\beta$-amyloid (11C-PiB). Administering multiple tracers to patient will lead to high radiation dose and cost. In addition, access to PET scans using new or less-available tracers with sophisticated production methods and short half-life isotopes may be very limited. Thus, it is desirable to develop an efficient multi-tracer PET synthesis model that can generate multi-tracer PET from single-tracer PET. Previous works on medical image synthesis focus on one-to-one fixed domain translations, and cannot simultaneously learn the feature from multi-tracer domains. Given 3 or more tracers, relying on previous methods will also create a heavy burden on the number of models to be trained. To tackle these issues, we propose a 3D unified anatomy-aware cyclic adversarial network (UCAN) for translating multi-tracer PET volumes with one unified generative model, where MR with anatomical information is incorporated. Evaluations on a multi-tracer PET dataset demonstrate the feasibility that our UCAN can generate high-quality multi-tracer PET volumes, with NMSE less than 15% for all PET tracers.