Dual-energy CT imaging from single-energy CT data with material decomposition convolutional neural network

Dual-energy computed tomography (DECT) is of great significance for clinical practice due to its huge potential to provide material-specific information. However, DECT scanners are usually more expensive than standard single-energy CT (SECT) scanners and thus are less accessible to undeveloped regions. In this paper, we show that the energy-domain correlation and anatomical consistency between standard DECT images can be harnessed by a deep learning model to provide high-performance DECT imaging from fully-sampled low-energy data together with single-view high-energy data, which can be obtained by using a scout-view high-energy image. We demonstrate the feasibility of the approach with contrast-enhanced DECT scans from 5,753 slices of images of twenty-two patients and show its superior performance on DECT applications. The deep learning-based approach could be useful to further significantly reduce the radiation dose of current premium DECT scanners and has the potential to simplify the hardware of DECT imaging systems and to enable DECT imaging using standard SECT scanners.