TCGAN: a transformer-enhanced GAN for PET synthetic CT

Abstract

Multimodal medical images can be used in a multifaceted approach to resolve a wide range of medical diagnostic problems. However, these images are generally difficult to obtain due to various limitations, such as cost of capture and patient safety. Medical image synthesis is used in various tasks to obtain better results. Recently, various studies have attempted to use generative adversarial networks for missing modality image synthesis, making good progress. In this study, we propose a generator based on a combination of transformer network and a convolutional neural network (CNN). The proposed method can combine the advantages of transformers and CNNs to promote a better detail effect. The network is designed for positron emission tomography (PET) to computer tomography synthesis, which can be used for PET attenuation correction. We also experimented on two datasets for magnetic resonance T1- to T2-weighted image synthesis. Based on qualitative and quantitative analyses, our proposed method outperforms the existing methods.