# PET Synthesis via Self-supervised Adaptive Residual Estimation Generative Adversarial Network

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.15550 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15550/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [An Empirical Study of Training Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02057/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning by Predicting Image Rotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07728/) (2018)
- [Enhanced Deep Residual Networks for Single Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02921/) (2017)
- [Context Encoders: Feature Learning by Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07379/) (2016)
- [A Survey on Deep Learning in Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05747/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning by Context Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.05192/) (2015)
- [Self-Supervised Pre-Training of Swin Transformers for 3D Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14791/) (2021)
- [A Deep Cascade of Convolutional Neural Networks for Dynamic MR Image Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02422/) (2017)
- [Common pitfalls and recommendations for using machine learning to detect and prognosticate for COVID-19 using chest radiographs and CT scans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.06388/) (2020)
- [Why rankings of biomedical image analysis competitions should be interpreted with care](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02051/) (2018)
- [Self-supervised Feature Learning for 3D Medical Images by Playing a Rubik's Cube](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02241/) (2019)
- [Transferable Visual Words: Exploiting the Semantics of Anatomical Patterns for Self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.10680/) (2021)
- [DeepPET: A deep encoder-decoder network for directly solving the PET reconstruction inverse problem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07851/) (2018)
- [Learning Semantics-enriched Representation via Self-discovery, Self-classification, and Self-restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.06959/) (2020)
- [Synthesis of Positron Emission Tomography (PET) Images via Multi-channel Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.09747/) (2017)
- [200x Low-dose PET Reconstruction using Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.04119/) (2017)
- [Full-count PET Recovery from Low-count Image Using a Dilated Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11865/) (2019)
- [CG-3DSRGAN: A classification guided 3D generative adversarial network for image quality recovery from low-dose PET images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00725/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Full-resolution MLPs Empower Medical Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16707/) (2023)
- [Pattern-Aware Diffusion Synthesis of fMRI/dMRI with Tissue and Microstructural Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.04963/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Positron emission tomography (PET) is a widely used, highly sensitive molecular imaging in clinical diagnosis. There is interest in reducing the radiation exposure from PET but also maintaining adequate image quality. Recent methods using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to generate synthesized high-quality PET images from low-dose counterparts have been reported to be state-of-the-art for low-to-high image recovery methods. However, these methods are prone to exhibiting discrepancies in texture and structure between synthesized and real images. Furthermore, the distribution shift between low-dose PET and standard PET has not been fully investigated. To address these issues, we developed a self-supervised adaptive residual estimation generative adversarial network (SS-AEGAN). We introduce (1) An adaptive residual estimation mapping mechanism, AE-Net, designed to dynamically rectify the preliminary synthesized PET images by taking the residual map between the low-dose PET and synthesized output as the input, and (2) A self-supervised pre-training strategy to enhance the feature representation of the coarse generator. Our experiments with a public benchmark dataset of total-body PET images show that SS-AEGAN consistently outperformed the state-of-the-art synthesis methods with various dose reduction factors.