# A Systematic Benchmark of GAN Architectures for MRI-to-CT Synthesis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.13520 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.13520/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 18 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [StarGAN: Unified Generative Adversarial Networks for Multi-Domain Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09020/) (2017)
- [Multimodal Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04732/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00848/) (2017)
- [DualGAN: Unsupervised Dual Learning for Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02510/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Pixel-Level Domain Adaptation with Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.05424/) (2016)
- [Toward Multimodal Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11586/) (2017)
- [Learning to Discover Cross-Domain Relations with Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05192/) (2017)
- [Coupled Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.07536/) (2016)
- [SynthRAD2025 Grand Challenge dataset: generating synthetic CTs for radiotherapy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17609/) (2025)
- [A comparative study between paired and unpaired Image Quality Assessment in Low-Dose CT Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05359/) (2023)
- [LatentAugment: Data Augmentation via Guided Manipulation of GAN's Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11375/) (2023)
- [Comparative Analysis of GAN and Diffusion for MRI-to-CT translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22049/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The translation from Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to Computed tomography (CT) has been proposed as an effective solution to facilitate MRI-only clinical workflows while limiting exposure to ionizing radiation. Although numerous Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) architectures have been proposed for MRI-to-CT translation, systematic and fair comparisons across heterogeneous models remain limited. We present a comprehensive benchmark of ten GAN architectures evaluated on the SynthRAD2025 dataset across three anatomical districts (abdomen, thorax, head-and-neck). All models were trained under a unified validation protocol with identical preprocessing and optimization settings. Performance was assessed using complementary metrics capturing voxel-wise accuracy, structural fidelity, perceptual quality, and distribution-level realism, alongside an analysis of computational complexity. Supervised Paired models consistently outperformed Unpaired approaches, confirming the importance of voxel-wise supervision. Pix2Pix achieved the most balanced performance across districts while maintaining a favorable quality-to-complexity trade-off. Multi-district training improved structural robustness, whereas intra-district training maximized voxel-wise fidelity. This benchmark provides quantitative and computational guidance for model selection in MRI-only radiotherapy workflows and establishes a reproducible framework for future comparative studies. To ensure the reproducibility of our experiments we make our code public, together with the overall results, at the following link:https://github.com/arco-group/MRI_TO_CT.git