A multi-channel cycleGAN for CBCT to CT synthesis
This work addresses image quality enhancement for CBCT-based adaptive radiotherapy, but it is incremental as it builds on existing CycleGAN methods with specific modifications.
The paper tackled CBCT to CT synthesis for adaptive radiotherapy by proposing a multi-channel CycleGAN with an auxiliary fusion network, achieving improved image contrast and fidelity for anatomical visualization.
Image synthesis is used to generate synthetic CTs (sCTs) from on-treatment cone-beam CTs (CBCTs) with a view to improving image quality and enabling accurate dose computation to facilitate a CBCT-based adaptive radiotherapy workflow. As this area of research gains momentum, developments in sCT generation methods are difficult to compare due to the lack of large public datasets and sizeable variation in training procedures. To compare and assess the latest advancements in sCT generation, the SynthRAD2023 challenge provides a public dataset and evaluation framework for both MR and CBCT to sCT synthesis. Our contribution focuses on the second task, CBCT-to-sCT synthesis. By leveraging a multi-channel input to emphasize specific image features, our approach effectively addresses some of the challenges inherent in CBCT imaging, whilst restoring the contrast necessary for accurate visualisation of patients' anatomy. Additionally, we introduce an auxiliary fusion network to further enhance the fidelity of generated sCT images.