Whole-body PET estimation from low count statistics using cycle-consistent generative adversarial networks

Lowering either the administered activity or scan time is desirable in PET imaging as it decreases the patient's radiation burden or improves patient comfort and reduces motion artifacts. But reducing these parameters lowers overall photon counts and increases noise, adversely impacting image contrast and quantification. To address this low count statistics problem, we propose a cycle-consistent generative adversarial network (Cycle GAN) model to estimate diagnostic quality PET images using low count data. Cycle GAN learns a transformation to synthesize diagnostic PET images using low count data that would be indistinguishable from our standard clinical protocol. The algorithm also learns an inverse transformation such that cycle low count PET data (inverse of synthetic estimate) generated from synthetic full count PET is close to the true low count PET. We introduced residual blocks into the generator to catch the differences between low count and full count PET in the training dataset and better handle noise. The average mean error and normalized mean square error in whole body were -0.14% +/- 1.43% and 0.52% +/- 0.19% with Cycle GAN model, compared to 5.59% +/- 2.11% and 3.51% +/- 4.14% on the original low count PET images. Normalized cross-correlation is improved from 0.970 to 0.996, and peak signal-to-noise ratio is increased from 39.4 dB to 46.0 dB with proposed method. We developed a deep learning-based approach to accurately estimate diagnostic quality PET datasets from one eighth of photon counts, and has great potential to improve low count PET image quality to the level of diagnostic PET used in clinical settings.