Development of an unsupervised cycle contrastive unpaired translation network for MRI-to-CT synthesis

Purpose The purpose of this work is to develop and evaluate a novel cycle-contrastive unpaired translation network (cycleCUT) for synthetic computed tomography (sCT) generation from T1-weighted magnetic resonance images (MRI). Methods The cycleCUT proposed in this work integrated the contrastive learning module from contrastive unpaired translation network (CUT) into the cycle-consistent generative adversarial network (cycleGAN) framework to effectively achieve unsupervised CT synthesis from MRI. The diagnostic MRI and radiotherapy planning CT images of 24 brain cancer patients were obtained and reshuffled to train the network. For comparison, the traditional cycleGAN and CUT were also implemented. The sCT images were then imported into a treatment planning system to verify their feasibility for radiotherapy planning. The mean absolute error (MAE), peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), and structural similarity index (SSIM) between the sCT and the corresponding real CT images were calculated. Gamma analysis between sCT- and CT-based dose distributions was also conducted. Results Quantitative evaluation of an independent test set of six patients showed that the average MAE was 69.62 +/- 5.68 Hounsfield Units (HU) for the proposed cycleCUT, significantly (p-value < 0.05) lower than that for cycleGAN (77.02 +/- 6.00 HU) and CUT (78.05 +/- 8.29). The average PSNR was 28.73 +/- 0.46 decibels (dB) for cycleCUT, significantly larger than that for cycleGAN (27.96 +/- 0.49 dB) and CUT (27.95 +/- 0.69 dB). The average SSIM for cycleCUT (0.918 +/- 0.012) was also significantly higher than that for cycleGAN (0.906 +/- 0.012) and CUT (0.903 +/- 0.015). Regarding gamma analysis, cycleCUT achieved the highest passing rate (97.95 +/- 1.24% at the 2%/2 mm criteria and 10% dose threshold) but was not significantly different from the others. Conclusion The proposed cycleCUT could be effectively trained using unaligned image data, and could generate better sCT images than cycleGAN and CUT in terms of HU number accuracy and fine structural details.