Seungryong Cho

Joonil Hwang, Sangjoon Park, NaHyeon Park et al.

In radiation therapy (RT), the reliance on pre-treatment computed tomography (CT) images encounter challenges due to anatomical changes, necessitating adaptive planning. Daily cone-beam CT (CBCT) imaging, pivotal for therapy adjustment, falls short in tissue density accuracy. To address this, our innovative approach integrates diffusion models for CT image generation, offering precise control over data synthesis. Leveraging a self-training method with knowledge distillation, we maximize CBCT data during therapy, complemented by sparse paired fan-beam CTs. This strategy, incorporated into state-of-the-art diffusion-based models, surpasses conventional methods like Pix2pix and CycleGAN. A meticulously curated dataset of 2800 paired CBCT and CT scans, supplemented by 4200 CBCT scans, undergoes preprocessing and teacher model training, including the Brownian Bridge Diffusion Model (BBDM). Pseudo-label CT images are generated, resulting in a dataset combining 5600 CT images with corresponding CBCT images. Thorough evaluation using MSE, SSIM, PSNR and LPIPS demonstrates superior performance against Pix2pix and CycleGAN. Our approach shows promise in generating high-quality CT images from CBCT scans in RT.

Hoyeon Lee, Jongha Lee, Hyeongseok Kim et al.

Recently, a number of approaches to low-dose computed tomography (CT) have been developed and deployed in commercialized CT scanners. Tube current reduction is perhaps the most actively explored technology with advanced image reconstruction algorithms. Sparse data sampling is another viable option to the low-dose CT, and sparse-view CT has been particularly of interest among the researchers in CT community. Since analytic image reconstruction algorithms would lead to severe image artifacts, various iterative algorithms have been developed for reconstructing images from sparsely view-sampled projection data. However, iterative algorithms take much longer computation time than the analytic algorithms, and images are usually prone to different types of image artifacts that heavily depend on the reconstruction parameters. Interpolation methods have also been utilized to fill the missing data in the sinogram of sparse-view CT thus providing synthetically full data for analytic image reconstruction. In this work, we introduce a deep-neural-network-enabled sinogram synthesis method for sparse-view CT, and show its outperformance to the existing interpolation methods and also to the iterative image reconstruction approach.

Jaejun Yoo, Sohail Sabir, Duchang Heo et al.

Diffuse optical tomography (DOT) has been investigated as an alternative imaging modality for breast cancer detection thanks to its excellent contrast to hemoglobin oxidization level. However, due to the complicated non-linear photon scattering physics and ill-posedness, the conventional reconstruction algorithms are sensitive to imaging parameters such as boundary conditions. To address this, here we propose a novel deep learning approach that learns non-linear photon scattering physics and obtains an accurate three dimensional (3D) distribution of optical anomalies. In contrast to the traditional black-box deep learning approaches, our deep network is designed to invert the Lippman-Schwinger integral equation using the recent mathematical theory of deep convolutional framelets. As an example of clinical relevance, we applied the method to our prototype DOT system. We show that our deep neural network, trained with only simulation data, can accurately recover the location of anomalies within biomimetic phantoms and live animals without the use of an exogenous contrast agent.