Digital Contrast CT Pulmonary Angiography Synthesis from Non-contrast CT for Pulmonary Vascular Disease

TL;DR

This study develops a CycleGAN-based method to synthesize Digital Contrast CTPA images from non-contrast CT scans, enabling better pulmonary vessel visualization without contrast agents, and improves downstream vascular analysis.

Contribution

Introduces a novel CycleGAN-based approach for generating contrast-enhanced pulmonary images from non-contrast scans, validated on multi-center data with superior performance.

Findings

Achieved high image fidelity metrics (SSIM 0.98) in synthesis.

Significantly improved pulmonary vessel segmentation accuracy.

Enhanced vascular volume correlation with standard CTPA.

Abstract

Computed Tomography Pulmonary Angiography (CTPA) is the reference standard for diagnosing pulmonary vascular diseases such as Pulmonary Embolism (PE) and Chronic Thromboembolic Pulmonary Hypertension (CTEPH). However, its reliance on iodinated contrast agents poses risks including nephrotoxicity and allergic reactions, particularly in high-risk patients. This study proposes a method to generate Digital Contrast CTPA (DCCTPA) from Non-Contrast CT (NCCT) scans using a cascaded synthesizer based on Cycle-Consistent Generative Adversarial Networks (CycleGAN). Totally retrospective 410 paired CTPA and NCCT scans were obtained from three centers. The model was trained and validated internally on 249 paired images. Extra dataset that comprising 161 paired images was as test set for model generalization evaluation and downstream clinical tasks validation. Compared with state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, the proposed method achieved the best comprehensive performance by evaluating quantitative metrics (For validation, MAE: 156.28, PSNR: 20.71 and SSIM: 0.98; For test, MAE: 165.12, PSNR: 20.27 and SSIM: 0.98) and qualitative visualization, demonstrating valid vessel enhancement, superior image fidelity and structural preservation. The approach was further applied to downstream tasks of pulmonary vessel segmentation and vascular quantification. On the test set, the average Dice, clDice, and clRecall of artery and vein pulmonary segmentation was 0.70, 0.71, 0.73 and 0.70, 0.72, 0.75 respectively, all markedly improved compared with NCCT inputs.\@ Inter-class Correlation Coefficient (ICC) for vessel volume between DCCTPA and CTPA was significantly better than that between NCCT and CTPA (Average ICC : 0.81 vs 0.70), indicating effective vascular enhancement in DCCTPA, especially for small vessels.