Title: Deep Boosted Regression for MR to CT Synthesis,
Abstract: Attenuation correction is an essential requirement of positron emission
tomography (PET) image reconstruction to allow for accurate quantification.
However, attenuation correction is particularly challenging for PET-MRI as
neither PET nor magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can directly image tissue
attenuation properties. MRI-based computed tomography (CT) synthesis has been
proposed as an alternative to physics based and segmentation-based approaches
that assign a population-based tissue density value in order to generate an
attenuation map. We propose a novel deep fully convolutional neural network
that generates synthetic CTs in a recursive manner by gradually reducing the
residuals of the previous network, increasing the overall accuracy and
generalisability, while keeping the number of trainable parameters within
reasonable limits. The model is trained on a database of 20 pre-acquired MRI/CT
pairs and a four-fold random bootstrapped validation with a 80:20 split is
performed. Quantitative results show that the proposed framework outperforms a
state-of-the-art atlas-based approach decreasing the Mean Absolute Error (MAE)
from 131HU to 68HU for the synthetic CTs and reducing the PET reconstruction
error from 14.3% to 7.2%.