When Misalignment Becomes Supervision: Structured Label Noise in Supervised Synthetic CT Generation

Abstract: Supervised synthetic CT (sCT) generation is commonly trained and evaluated as voxel-wise regression against registered reference CT images. In practice, MRI-CT and CBCT-CT pairs are aligned through registration procedures that leave residual misalignments. These residuals are not independent intensity noise but spatially coherent geometric discrepancies that act as structured label noise. We investigate how this registration-induced bias affects supervised MRI-to-CT and CBCT-to-CT synthesis on 1,784 paired patients covering five anatomical regions. Voxel-wise scores strongly depend on the consistency between the registration used to build the training targets and the one used for evaluation: models score best when both conventions match, showing that networks partly learn the geometric convention of the registration pipeline and that standard metrics reward it. Training on more anatomically consistent registrations reduces prediction variability and improves out-of-distribution robustness, and CT-only controls show that registration alone produces metric errors in the range of top challenge submissions. To mitigate the limits of voxel-wise supervision, we introduce a perceptual loss computed in the feature space of a pretrained Segment Anything encoder. Compared with MAE-only and VGG-based objectives, it improves downstream segmentation and yields sharper, more structurally coherent sCT. Perceptual and voxel-wise metrics disagree under imperfect alignment and agree when the evaluation geometry is reliable. These results identify registration-induced bias as a central confounder in supervised sCT generation and argue for complementing voxel-wise agreement with anatomy-oriented evaluation criteria.