Airway measurement by refinement of synthetic images improves mortality prediction in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis

TL;DR

This study introduces a style transfer-based airway synthesis method that improves mortality prediction in IPF patients by providing more accurate airway measurements from CT scans.

Contribution

The paper presents the Airway Transfer Network (ATN), a novel style transfer approach that outperforms GAN-based methods in airway synthesis for clinical CT analysis in IPF.

Findings

ATN is quicker and easier to train than simGAN.

ATN-derived airway metrics are stronger predictors of mortality.

Synthetic airway data enhances clinical outcome prediction.

Abstract

Several chronic lung diseases, like idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) are characterised by abnormal dilatation of the airways. Quantification of airway features on computed tomography (CT) can help characterise disease progression. Physics based airway measurement algorithms have been developed, but have met with limited success in part due to the sheer diversity of airway morphology seen in clinical practice. Supervised learning methods are also not feasible due to the high cost of obtaining precise airway annotations. We propose synthesising airways by style transfer using perceptual losses to train our model, Airway Transfer Network (ATN). We compare our ATN model with a state-of-the-art GAN-based network (simGAN) using a) qualitative assessment; b) assessment of the ability of ATN and simGAN based CT airway metrics to predict mortality in a population of 113 patients with IPF. ATN was shown to be quicker and easier to train than simGAN. ATN-based airway measurements were also found to be consistently stronger predictors of mortality than simGAN-derived airway metrics on IPF CTs. Airway synthesis by a transformation network that refines synthetic data using perceptual losses is a realistic alternative to GAN-based methods for clinical CT analyses of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. Our source code can be found at https://github.com/ashkanpakzad/ATN that is compatible with the existing open-source airway analysis framework, AirQuant.