Clinical Super-Resolution Computed Tomography of Bone Microstructure: Application in Musculoskeletal and Dental Imaging

Abstract

Purpose

Clinical cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) devices are limited to imaging features of half a millimeter in size and cannot quantify the tissue microstructure. We demonstrate a robust deep-learning method for enhancing clinical CT images, only requiring a limited set of easy-to-acquire training data.

Methods

Knee tissue from five cadavers and six total knee replacement patients, and 14 teeth from eight patients were scanned using laboratory CT as training data for the developed super-resolution (SR) technique. The method was benchmarked against ex vivo test set, 52 osteochondral samples are imaged with clinical and laboratory CT. A quality assurance phantom was imaged with clinical CT to quantify the technical image quality. To visually assess the clinical image quality, musculoskeletal and maxillofacial CBCT studies were enhanced with SR and contrasted to interpolated images. A dental radiologist and surgeon reviewed the maxillofacial images.

Results

The SR models predicted the bone morphological parameters on the ex vivo test set more accurately than conventional image processing. The phantom analysis confirmed higher spatial resolution on the SR images than interpolation, but image grayscales were modified. Musculoskeletal and maxillofacial CBCT images showed more details on SR than interpolation; however, artifacts were observed near the crown of the teeth. The readers assessed mediocre overall scores for both SR and interpolation. The source code and pretrained networks are publicly available.

Conclusion

Model training with laboratory modalities could push the resolution limit beyond state-of-the-art clinical musculoskeletal and dental CBCT. A larger maxillofacial training dataset is recommended for dental applications.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10439-024-03450-y.