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Aorta-aware GAN for non-contrast to artery contrasted CT translation and its application to abdominal aortic aneurysm detection

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International Journal of Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Purpose

Artery contrasted computed tomography (CT) enables accurate observations of the arteries and surrounding structures, thus being widely used for the diagnosis of diseases such as aneurysm. To avoid the complications caused by contrast agent, this paper proposes an aorta-aware deep learning method to synthesize artery contrasted CT volume form non-contrast CT volume.

Methods

By introducing auxiliary multi-resolution segmentation tasks in the generator, we force the proposed network to focus on the regions of aorta and the other vascular structures. Then, the segmentation results produced by the auxiliary tasks were used to extract aorta. The detection of abnormal CT images containing aneurysm was implemented by estimating the maximum axial radius of aorta.

Results

In comparison with the baseline models, the proposed network with auxiliary tasks achieved better performances with higher peak signal-noise ratio value. In aorta regions which are supposed to be the main region of interest in many clinic scenarios, the average improvement can be up to 0.33dB. Using the synthesized artery contrasted CT, the F score of aneurysm detection achieved 0.58 at slice level and 0.85 at case level.

Conclusion

This study tries to address the problem of non-contrast to artery contrasted CT modality translation by employing a deep learning model with aorta awareness. The auxiliary tasks help the proposed model focus on aorta regions and synthesize results with clearer boundaries. Additionally, the synthesized artery contrasted CT shows potential in identifying slices with abdominal aortic aneurysm, and may provide an option for patients with contrast agent allergy.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks for the help and advises from the members of Mori laboratory and AMED NII team. A part of this research was supported by the AMED Grant Numbers JP19lk1010036, JP20lk1010036, and JSPS KAKENHI 26108006, 17K20099, 17H00867.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Graduate School of Informatics, Nagoya University, Chikusa-ku, Nagoya, Aichi, Japan

    Tao Hu, Masahiro Oda, Yuichiro Hayashi, Zhongyang Lu & Kensaku Mori

  2. Information Strategy Office, Information and Communications, Nagoya University, Chikusa-ku, Nagoya, Aichi, Japan

    Masahiro Oda

  3. Department of Radiology, Juntendo University, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, Japan

    Kanako Kunishima Kumamaru, Toshiaki Akashi & Shigeki Aoki

  4. Research Center for Medical Bigdata, National Institute of Informatics, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, Japan

    Kensaku Mori

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  1. Tao Hu
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  2. Masahiro Oda
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  4. Zhongyang Lu
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Correspondence to Kensaku Mori.

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Conflict of interest

K. Mori is receiving research funding from Olympus (Grant No. 30,000 USD).

Ethical approval

All procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975 (in its most recently amended version).

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Informed consent was obtained from all patients included in the study.

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Hu, T., Oda, M., Hayashi, Y. et al. Aorta-aware GAN for non-contrast to artery contrasted CT translation and its application to abdominal aortic aneurysm detection. Int J CARS 17, 97–105 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11548-021-02492-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11548-021-02492-0

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