Leveraging Multiphase CT for Quality Enhancement of Portal Venous CT: Utility for Pancreas Segmentation
Journal:
arXiv
Published Date:
Jan 23, 2025
Abstract
Multiphase CT studies are routinely obtained in clinical practice for
diagnosis and management of various diseases, such as cancer. However, the CT
studies can be acquired with low radiation doses, different scanners, and are
frequently affected by motion and metal artifacts. Prior approaches have
targeted the quality improvement of one specific CT phase (e.g., non-contrast
CT). In this work, we hypothesized that leveraging multiple CT phases for the
quality enhancement of one phase may prove advantageous for downstream tasks,
such as segmentation. A 3D progressive fusion and non-local (PFNL) network was
developed. It was trained with three degraded (low-quality) phases
(non-contrast, arterial, and portal venous) to enhance the quality of the
portal venous phase. Then, the effect of scan quality enhancement was evaluated
using a proxy task of pancreas segmentation, which is useful for tracking
pancreatic cancer. The proposed approach improved the pancreas segmentation by
3% over the corresponding low-quality CT scan. To the best of our knowledge, we
are the first to harness multiphase CT for scan quality enhancement and
improved pancreas segmentation.
