Generating synthetic contrast enhancement from non-contrast chest computed tomography using a generative adversarial network

This study aimed to evaluate a deep learning model for generating synthetic contrast-enhanced CT (sCECT) from non-contrast chest CT (NCCT). A deep learning model was applied to generate sCECT from NCCT. We collected three separate data sets, the development set (n = 25) for model training and tuning, test set 1 (n = 25) for technical evaluation, and test set 2 (n = 12) for clinical utility evaluation. In test set 1, image similarity metrics were calculated. In test set 2, the lesion contrast-to-noise ratio of the mediastinal lymph nodes was measured, and an observer study was conducted to compare lesion conspicuity. Comparisons were performed using the paired t-test or Wilcoxon signed-rank test. In test set 1, sCECT showed a lower mean absolute error (41.72 vs 48.74; P P P P P P ≤ .001). Synthetic CECT generated from NCCT improves the depiction of mediastinal lymph nodes.