Multi-phase CT synthesis-assisted segmentation of abdominal organs

Abstract

To propose a method for abdominal multi-organ segmentation assisted by multi-phase CT synthesis. Multi-phase CT synthesis for synthesizing high-quality CT images was used to increase the information details for image segmentation. A transformer block was introduced to help to capture long-range semantic information in cooperation with perceptual loss to minimize the differences between the real image and synthesized image. The model was trained using multi-phase CT dataset of 526 total cases from Nanfang Hospital. The mean maximum absolute error (MAE) of the synthesized non-contrast CT, venous phase contrast- enhanced CT (CECT), and delay phase CECT images from arterial phase CECT was 19.192±3.381, 20.140±2.676 and 22.538±2.874, respectively, which were better than those of images synthesized using other methods. Validation of the multi-phase CT synthesis-assisted abdominal multi-organ segmentation method showed an average dice coefficient of 0.847 for the internal validation set and 0.823 for the external validation set. The propose method is capable of synthesizing high-quality multi-phase CT images to effectively reduce the errors in registration between different phase CT images and improve the performance for segmentation of 13 abdominal organs.