Vision Foundation Models for Computed Tomography

Foundation models (FMs) have shown transformative potential in radiology by performing diverse, complex tasks across imaging modalities. Here, we developed CT-FM, a large-scale 3D image-based pre-trained model designed explicitly for various radiological tasks. CT-FM was pre-trained using 148,000 computed tomography (CT) scans from the Imaging Data Commons through label-agnostic contrastive learning. We evaluated CT-FM across four categories of tasks, namely, whole-body and tumor segmentation, head CT triage, medical image retrieval, and semantic understanding, showing superior performance against state-of-the-art models. Beyond quantitative success, CT-FM demonstrated the ability to cluster regions anatomically and identify similar anatomical and structural concepts across scans. Furthermore, it remained robust across test-retest settings and indicated reasonable salient regions attached to its embeddings. This study demonstrates the value of large-scale medical imaging foundation models and by open-sourcing the model weights, code, and data, aims to support more adaptable, reliable, and interpretable AI solutions in radiology.

Exploring constraints on CycleGAN-based CBCT enhancement for adaptive radiotherapy

Research exploring CycleGAN-based synthetic image generation has recently accelerated in the medical community, as it is able to leverage unpaired datasets effectively. However, clinical acceptance of these synthetic images pose a significant challenge as they are subject to strict evaluation protocols. A commonly established drawback of the CycleGAN, the introduction of artifacts in generated images is unforgivable in the case of medical images. In an attempt to alleviate this drawback, we explore different constraints of the CycleGAN along with investigation of adaptive control of these constraints. The benefits of imposing additional constraints on the CycleGAN, in the form of structure retaining losses is also explored. A generalized frequency loss inspired by arxiv:2012.12821 that preserves content in the frequency domain between source and target is investigated and compared with existing losses such as the MIND loss arXiv:1809.04536. CycleGAN implementations from the ganslate framework (https://github.com/ganslate-team/ganslate) are used for experimentation in this thesis. Synthetic images generated from our methods are quantitatively and qualitatively investigated and outperform the baseline CycleGAN and other approaches. Furthermore, no observable artifacts or loss in image quality is found, which is critical for acceptance of these synthetic images. The synthetic medical images thus generated are also evaluated using domain-specific evaluation and using segmentation as a downstream task, in order to clearly highlight their applicability to clinical workflows.