  Positron emission tomography (PET) image synthesis plays an important role,
which can be used to boost the training data for computer aided diagnosis
systems. However, existing image synthesis methods have problems in
synthesizing the low resolution PET images. To address these limitations, we
propose multi-channel generative adversarial networks (M-GAN) based PET image
synthesis method. Different to the existing methods which rely on using
low-level features, the proposed M-GAN is capable to represent the features in
a high-level of semantic based on the adversarial learning concept. In
addition, M-GAN enables to take the input from the annotation (label) to
synthesize the high uptake regions e.g., tumors and from the computed
tomography (CT) images to constrain the appearance consistency and output the
synthetic PET images directly. Our results on 50 lung cancer PET-CT studies
indicate that our method was much closer to the real PET images when compared
with the existing methods.
