arXiv AI

Dose-Aware Cold Diffusion with Physics Consistency for Generalizable Low-Dose CT Reconstruction

The paper introduces Dose-Aware Cold Diffusion (DACD), a physics-consistent framework that treats radiation dose as a continuous latent variable in a cold diffusion process for low-dose CT reconstruction. DACD combines dose-aware perception, multi-scale structural priors, and dose-calibrated step allocation to guide denoising, and adds an iterative forward-backprojection correction to enforce projection-domain consistency. Experiments on Mayo-2020, Mayo-2016, and LoDoPaB-CT show DACD outperforms existing diffusion-based and physics-guided methods, especially at ultra-low doses, and generalizes robustly across continuous, unseen dose levels.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 15

GenDiff: A Dose and Anatomy Aware Diffusion Model with Structural Prior Refinement for Low-Dose CT Reconstruction and Generalization

arXiv:2607. 11941v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Computed tomography (CT) is a critical imaging modality for clinical diagnosis, but reducing radiation dose inevitably introduces severe noise and structured artifacts that degrade image quality.

By Md Imam Ahasan, Guangchao Yang, A F M Abdun Noor, Kah Ong Michael Goh, S. M. Hasan Mahmud, Md Mahfuzur Rahman
arXiv AI
Aug 11

Toward CT-Equivalent Image Quality in Low-Dose Radiotherapy Planning: Conditional Diffusion-Based CBCT-to-CT Synthesis and the Impact of CBCT Input Representation

arXiv:2608. 08919v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: During standard radiotherapy planning, repeated CT acquisitions are often required for patient registration, verification, and adaptive planning, resulting in increased cumulative X-ray dose.

By Alzahra Altalib, Chunhui Li, Christopher Hamill Taylor, Sankar Pillai, Alessandro Perelli
arXiv AI
Jun 16

LUCID: Learned Undersampling-Adaptive Consistency-Guided Inference with Deterministic Flow Matching for Sparse-View CT Reconstruction

arXiv:2606. 16212v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sparse-view CT reduces radiation dose and scanning time by acquiring fewer projection views, but angular undersampling makes reconstruction severely ill-posed, causing streak artifacts, structural blurring, and loss of fine details.

By Jigang Duan, Jiayi Wang, Heran Wang, Ping Yang, Genwei Ma, Xing Zhao
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 3

Conditional Diffusion Posterior Alignment for Sparse-View CT Reconstruction

The paper introduces Conditional Diffusion Posterior Alignment (CDPA), a method that scales diffusion-based sparse‑view CT reconstruction to large 3D volumes by conditioning a 2D U‑Net diffusion model on an initial 3D reconstruction and enforcing data‑consistency alignment. CDPA addresses high memory demands, limited 3D training data, and slice‑wise inconsistencies, achieving state‑of‑the‑art performance on synthetic and real Cone Beam CT data. The authors also demonstrate that the same approach improves fast denoising U‑Nets, delivering near‑diffusion quality at a fraction of the computational cost.

By Luis Barba, Johannes Kirschner, Benjamin Bejar
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 3

Physics-Driven Independent Pair Generation for Iterative Self-Supervised Low-Dose CT Denoising

The paper introduces a physics‑driven, cross‑domain iterative framework for self‑supervised low‑dose CT denoising. It first uses a learned sinogram prior and the LDCT noise model to separate Poisson and Gaussian noise components, then applies binomial and Gaussian data thinning to create two training pairs with independent noise realizations. These pairs train an image‑domain network whose outputs are forward‑projected to refine the prior, yielding consistent performance gains over existing self‑supervised baselines and comparable results to supervised methods.

By Xianlei Han, Shaoyu Wang, Jiancheng Fang, Weiwen Wu, Qiegen Liu
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 31

Physics-Guided Flow Matching for CT Image Reconstruction

The paper introduces a high‑resolution Rectified Flow Matching model trained on 256×256 chest CT images to serve as a generative prior for CT reconstruction. A two‑stage training strategy—initial strong anatomically informed augmentation followed by fine‑tuning—helps mitigate overfitting and improve structural fidelity. When evaluated on various CT inverse problems, Flow Matching‑based reconstruction methods outperform diffusion‑based algorithms in PSNR, SSIM, and perceptual quality while requiring fewer sampling steps.

By Davide Evangelista