A Practical Weakly Supervised Framework for Dose-Up Translation of Low-Enhanced CT Under Clinical Acquisition Variability

초록

Low-dose contrast-enhanced computed tomography (CT) is widely used to reduce contrast-induced toxicity, but reduced iodine concentration and inconsistent acquisition conditions often produce uneven contrast attenuation and spatial misalignment between scans. In this context, we define dose-up translation as the computational process of synthetically enhancing low-dose contrast images to approximate the visual and diagnostic quality of full-dose acquisitions. These factors limit the effective use of routinely acquired imaging data for dose-up translation, particularly in veterinary abdominal CT where respiratory motion and postural variability further degrade anatomical correspondence. We present a weakly aligned enhancement framework designed to operate under spatial misalignment and limited paired data. Registration-based pseudo-references are constructed using a hybrid strategy that combines deformable anatomical alignment with feature-level correspondence. Dose-up translation is performed using structure-preserving translation with multi-scale consistency and edge-aware regularization to maintain anatomical boundaries. To address limited low-dose datasets, a two-stage knowledge transfer strategy transfers anatomical and contrast priors from abundant pre-contrast data. Quantitative evaluation demonstrated region-level contrast-to-noise ratio improvements of up to 31.5% (e.g., from 5.55 to 8.38 in the caudal vena cava (CVC), p < 0.05) compared with baseline enhancement methods across 1171 test slices. Experiments demonstrate consistent improvements in structural fidelity, distributional realism, and region-level vascular conspicuity compared with paired, unpaired, and synthetic-pairing baselines. These findings suggest that the dose-up translation of low-enhanced CT is better formulated as a weakly aligned domain adaptation problem rather than a strictly paired reconstruction task, enabling practical image translation under realistic clinical acquisition variability.

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