Deep-learned generation of renal dual-energy CT from a single-energy scan

Abstract

To investigate the role of the deep-learning (DL) method in the generation of dual-energy computed tomography (DECT) images from single-energy images for precise diagnosis of kidney stone type. DECT of 23 patients was acquired, and the stone types were investigated based on the DECT software suggestions. The data were divided into two paired groups:120 kVp input and 80 kVp target and 120 kVp input and 135 kVp targets, p2p-UNet-GAN was exploited to generate the different energy images based on the common CT protocols. The images generated of the generative adversarial network (GAN) network were evaluated based on the SSIM, PSNR, and MSE metrics, and the values were estimated as 0.85-0.95, 28-32, and 0.85-0.89 respectively. The attenuation ratio of test patient images were estimated and compared with real patient reports. The network achieved high accuracy in stone region localisation and resulted in accurate stone type predictions. This study presents a useful method based on the DL technique to reduce patient radiation dose and facilitate the prediction of urinary stone types using single-energy CT imaging.