CT-SDM: A Sampling Diffusion Model for Sparse-View CT Reconstruction across All Sampling Rates

TL;DR

This paper introduces CT-SDM, a diffusion-based model that adaptively reconstructs high-quality CT images from sparse views at any sampling rate, enhancing flexibility and robustness in clinical applications.

Contribution

The study presents a novel sampling diffusion model with an innovative degradation operator, enabling a single trained model to handle all sampling rates in sparse-view CT reconstruction.

Findings

Effective reconstruction across all sampling rates

Superior image quality compared to existing methods

Robust performance on multiple datasets

Abstract

Sparse views X-ray computed tomography has emerged as a contemporary technique to mitigate radiation dose. Because of the reduced number of projection views, traditional reconstruction methods can lead to severe artifacts. Recently, research studies utilizing deep learning methods has made promising progress in removing artifacts for Sparse-View Computed Tomography (SVCT). However, given the limitations on the generalization capability of deep learning models, current methods usually train models on fixed sampling rates, affecting the usability and flexibility of model deployment in real clinical settings. To address this issue, our study proposes a adaptive reconstruction method to achieve high-performance SVCT reconstruction at any sampling rate. Specifically, we design a novel imaging degradation operator in the proposed sampling diffusion model for SVCT (CT-SDM) to simulate the projection process in the sinogram domain. Thus, the CT-SDM can gradually add projection views to highly undersampled measurements to generalize the full-view sinograms. By choosing an appropriate starting point in diffusion inference, the proposed model can recover the full-view sinograms from any sampling rate with only one trained model. Experiments on several datasets have verified the effectiveness and robustness of our approach, demonstrating its superiority in reconstructing high-quality images from sparse-view CT scans across various sampling rates.