MedFusionGAN: multimodal medical image fusion using an unsupervised deep generative adversarial network

Abstract

Abstract Purpose This study proposed an end-to-end unsupervised medical fusion generative adversarial network, MedFusionGAN, to fuse computed tomography (CT) and high-resolution isotropic 3D T1-Gd Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) image sequences to generate an image with CT bone structure and MRI soft tissue contrast to improve target delineation and to reduce the radiotherapy planning time. Methods We used a publicly available multicenter medical dataset (GLIS-RT, 230 patients) from the Cancer Imaging Archive. To improve the models generalization, we consider different imaging protocols and patients with various brain tumor types, including metastases. The proposed MedFusionGAN consisted of one generator network and one discriminator network trained in an adversarial scenario. Content, style, and L1 losses were used for training the generator to preserve the texture and structure information of the MRI and CT images. Results The MedFusionGAN successfully generates fused images with MRI soft-tissue and CT bone contrast. The results of the MedFusionGAN were quantitatively and qualitatively compared with seven traditional and eight deep learning (DL) state-of-the-art methods. Qualitatively, our method fused the source images with the highest spatial resolution without adding the image artifacts. We reported nine quantitative metrics to quantify the preservation of structural similarity, contrast, distortion level, and image edges in fused images. Our method outperformed both traditional and DL methods on six out of nine metrics. And it got the second performance rank for three and two quantitative metrics when compared with traditional and DL methods, respectively. To compare soft-tissue contrast, intensity profile along tumor and tumor contours of the fusion methods were evaluated. MedFusionGAN provides a more consistent, better intensity profile, and a better segmentation performance. Conclusions The proposed end-to-end unsupervised method successfully fused MRI and CT images. The fused image could improve targets and OARs delineation, which is an important aspect of radiotherapy treatment planning.