Generating synthesized computed tomography from CBCT using a conditional generative adversarial network for head and neck cancer patients

Purpose: To overcome the imaging artifacts and Hounsfield unit inaccuracy limitations of cone-beam computed tomography, a conditional generative adversarial network is proposed to synthesize high-quality computed tomography-like images from cone-beam computed tomography images. Methods: A total of 120 paired cone-beam computed tomography and computed tomography scans of patients with head and neck cancer who were treated during January 2019 and December 2020 retrospectively collected; the scans of 90 patients were assembled into training and validation datasets, and the scans of 30 patients were used in testing datasets. The proposed method integrates a U-Net backbone architecture with residual blocks into a conditional generative adversarial network framework to learn a mapping from cone-beam computed tomography images to pair planning computed tomography images. The mean absolute error, root-mean-square error, structural similarity index, and peak signal-to-noise ratio were used to assess the performance of this method compared with U-Net and CycleGAN. Results: The synthesized computed tomography images produced by the conditional generative adversarial network were visually similar to planning computed tomography images. The mean absolute error, root-mean-square error, structural similarity index, and peak signal-to-noise ratio calculated from test images generated by conditional generative adversarial network were all significantly different than CycleGAN and U-Net. The mean absolute error, root-mean-square error, structural similarity index, and peak signal-to-noise ratio values between the synthesized computed tomography and the reference computed tomography were 16.75 ± 11.07 Hounsfield unit, 58.15 ± 28.64 Hounsfield unit, 0.92 ± 0.04, and 30.58 ± 3.86 dB in conditional generative adversarial network, 20.66 ± 12.15 Hounsfield unit, 66.53 ± 29.73 Hounsfield unit, 0.90 ± 0.05, and 29.29 ± 3.49 dB in CycleGAN, and 16.82 ± 10.99 Hounsfield unit, 58.68 ± 28.34 Hounsfield unit, 0.92 ± 0.04, and 30.48 ± 3.83 dB in U-Net, respectively. Conclusions: The synthesized computed tomography generated from the cone-beam computed tomography-based conditional generative adversarial network method has accurate computed tomography numbers while keeping the same anatomical structure as cone-beam computed tomography. It can be used effectively for quantitative applications in radiotherapy.