A Strictly Bounded Deep Network for Unpaired Cyclic Translation of Medical Images

Medical image translation is an ill-posed problem. Unlike existing paired unbounded unidirectional translation networks, in this paper, we consider unpaired medical images and provide a strictly bounded network that yields a stable bidirectional translation. We propose a patch-level concatenated cyclic conditional generative adversarial network (pCCGAN) embedded with adaptive dictionary learning. It consists of two cyclically connected CGANs of 47 layers each; where both generators (each of 32 layers) are conditioned with concatenation of alternate unpaired patches from input and target modality images (not ground truth) of the same organ. The key idea is to exploit cross-neighborhood contextual feature information that bounds the translation space and boosts generalization. The generators are further equipped with adaptive dictionaries learned from the contextual patches to reduce possible degradation. Discriminators are 15-layer deep networks that employ minimax function to validate the translated imagery. A combined loss function is formulated with adversarial, non-adversarial, forward-backward cyclic, and identity losses that further minimize the variance of the proposed learning machine. Qualitative, quantitative, and ablation analysis show superior results on real CT and MRI.