Cone Beam Computed Tomography Image-Quality Improvement Using “One-Shot” Super-resolution

Cone beam computed tomography (CBCT) images are convenient representations for obtaining information about patients' internal organs, but their lower image quality than those of treatment planning CT images constitutes an important shortcoming. Several proposed CBCT image-quality improvement methods based on deep learning require large amounts of training data. Our newly developed model using a super-resolution method, "one-shot" super-resolution (OSSR) based on the "zero-shot" super-resolution method, requires only small amounts of training data to improve CBCT image quality using only the target CBCT image and the paired treatment planning CT image. For this study, pelvic CBCT images and treatment planning CT images of 30 prostate cancer patients were used. We calculated the root mean squared error (RMSE), peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), and structural similarity (SSIM) to evaluate image-quality improvement and normalized mutual information (NMI) as a quantitative evaluation of positional accuracy. Our proposed method can improve CBCT image quality without requiring large amounts of training data. After applying our proposed method, the resulting RMSE, PSNR, SSIM, and NMI between the CBCT images and the treatment planning CT images were as much as 0.86, 1.05, 1.03, and 1.31 times better than those obtained without using our proposed method. By comparison, CycleGAN exhibited values of 0.91, 1.03, 1.02, and 1.16. The proposed method achieved performance equivalent to that of CycleGAN, which requires images from approximately 30 patients for training. Findings demonstrated improvement of CBCT image quality using only the target CBCT images and the paired treatment planning CT images.