MRI to PET Cross-Modality Translation using Globally and Locally Aware GAN (GLA-GAN) for Multi-Modal Diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease

TL;DR

This paper introduces GLA-GAN, a novel cross-modality translation model that synthesizes PET scans from MR images to improve Alzheimer's disease diagnosis, combining global and local structural fidelity.

Contribution

The paper presents a new end-to-end GAN architecture with multi-scale loss functions for high-quality FDG-PET synthesis from MR images, enhancing diagnostic utility.

Findings

Synthesized PET scans with improved image quality.

Enhanced clinical utility in AD diagnosis.

Better structural fidelity compared to existing models.

Abstract

Medical imaging datasets are inherently high dimensional with large variability and low sample sizes that limit the effectiveness of deep learning algorithms. Recently, generative adversarial networks (GANs) with the ability to synthesize realist images have shown great potential as an alternative to standard data augmentation techniques. Our work focuses on cross-modality synthesis of fluorodeoxyglucose~(FDG) Positron Emission Tomography~(PET) scans from structural Magnetic Resonance~(MR) images using generative models to facilitate multi-modal diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD). Specifically, we propose a novel end-to-end, globally and locally aware image-to-image translation GAN (GLA-GAN) with a multi-path architecture that enforces both global structural integrity and fidelity to local details. We further supplement the standard adversarial loss with voxel-level intensity, multi-scale structural similarity (MS-SSIM) and region-of-interest (ROI) based loss components that reduce reconstruction error, enforce structural consistency at different scales and perceive variation in regional sensitivity to AD respectively. Experimental results demonstrate that our GLA-GAN not only generates synthesized FDG-PET scans with enhanced image quality but also superior clinical utility in improving AD diagnosis compared to state-of-the-art models. Finally, we attempt to interpret some of the internal units of the GAN that are closely related to this specific cross-modality generation task.