Enhancing Cross-Modality Synthesis: Subvolume Merging for MRI-to-CT Conversion
This incremental improvement enhances synthetic CT accuracy for medical imaging applications.
The study tackled MRI-to-CT conversion for radiation therapy by introducing a 3D subvolume merging technique with optimal overlap, reducing the mean absolute error from 52.65 HU to 47.75 HU.
Providing more precise tissue attenuation information, synthetic computed tomography (sCT) generated from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) contributes to improved radiation therapy treatment planning. In our study, we employ the advanced SwinUNETR framework for synthesizing CT from MRI images. Additionally, we introduce a three-dimensional subvolume merging technique in the prediction process. By selecting an optimal overlap percentage for adjacent subvolumes, stitching artifacts are effectively mitigated, leading to a decrease in the mean absolute error (MAE) between sCT and the labels from 52.65 HU to 47.75 HU. Furthermore, implementing a weight function with a gamma value of 0.9 results in the lowest MAE within the same overlap area. By setting the overlap percentage between 50% and 70%, we achieve a balance between image quality and computational efficiency.