- Yu, Pengxin;
- Zhang, Haoyue;
- Wang, Dawei;
- Zhang, Rongguo;
- Deng, Mei;
- Yang, Haoyu;
- Wu, Lijun;
- Liu, Xiaoxu;
- Oh, Andrea;
- Abtin, Fereidoun;
- Prosper, Ashley;
- Ruchalski, Kathleen;
- Wang, Nana;
- Zhang, Huairong;
- Li, Ye;
- Lv, Xinna;
- Liu, Min;
- Zhao, Shaohong;
- Li, Dasheng;
- Hoffman, John;
- Aberle, Denise;
- Liang, Chaoyang;
- Qi, Shouliang;
- Arnold, Corey
CT is crucial for diagnosing chest diseases, with image quality affected by spatial resolution. Thick-slice CT remains prevalent in practice due to cost considerations, yet its coarse spatial resolution may hinder accurate diagnoses. Our multicenter study develops a deep learning synthetic model with Convolutional-Transformer hybrid encoder-decoder architecture for generating thin-slice CT from thick-slice CT on a single center (1576 participants) and access the synthetic CT on three cross-regional centers (1228 participants). The qualitative image quality of synthetic and real thin-slice CT is comparable (p = 0.16). Four radiologists accuracy in diagnosing community-acquired pneumonia using synthetic thin-slice CT surpasses thick-slice CT (p < 0.05), and matches real thin-slice CT (p > 0.99). For lung nodule detection, sensitivity with thin-slice CT outperforms thick-slice CT (p < 0.001) and comparable to real thin-slice CT (p > 0.05). These findings indicate the potential of our model to generate high-quality synthetic thin-slice CT as a practical alternative when real thin-slice CT is preferred but unavailable.