T. A. Joyce

Yuliang Huang, Imraj Singh, Thomas Joyce et al.

3D Cone-Beam CT (CBCT) is widely used in radiotherapy but suffers from motion artifacts due to breathing. A common clinical approach mitigates this by sorting projections into respiratory phases and reconstructing images per phase, but this does not account for breathing variability. Dynamic CBCT instead reconstructs images at each projection, capturing continuous motion without phase sorting. Recent advancements in 4D Gaussian Splatting (4DGS) offer powerful tools for modeling dynamic scenes, yet their application to dynamic CBCT remains underexplored. Existing 4DGS methods, such as HexPlane, use implicit motion representations, which are computationally expensive. While explicit low-rank motion models have been proposed, they lack spatial regularization, leading to inconsistencies in Gaussian motion. To address these limitations, we introduce a free-form deformation (FFD)-based spatial basis function and a deformation-informed framework that enforces consistency by coupling the temporal evolution of Gaussian's mean position, scale, and rotation under a unified deformation field. We evaluate our approach on six CBCT datasets, demonstrating superior image quality with a 6x speedup over HexPlane. These results highlight the potential of deformation-informed 4DGS for efficient, motion-compensated CBCT reconstruction. The code is available at https://github.com/Yuliang-Huang/DIGS.

Agisilaos Chartsias, Thomas Joyce, Giorgos Papanastasiou et al.

Typically, a medical image offers spatial information on the anatomy (and pathology) modulated by imaging specific characteristics. Many imaging modalities including Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and Computed Tomography (CT) can be interpreted in this way. We can venture further and consider that a medical image naturally factors into some spatial factors depicting anatomy and factors that denote the imaging characteristics. Here, we explicitly learn this decomposed (disentangled) representation of imaging data, focusing in particular on cardiac images. We propose Spatial Decomposition Network (SDNet), which factorises 2D medical images into spatial anatomical factors and non-spatial modality factors. We demonstrate that this high-level representation is ideally suited for several medical image analysis tasks, such as semi-supervised segmentation, multi-task segmentation and regression, and image-to-image synthesis. Specifically, we show that our model can match the performance of fully supervised segmentation models, using only a fraction of the labelled images. Critically, we show that our factorised representation also benefits from supervision obtained either when we use auxiliary tasks to train the model in a multi-task setting (e.g. regressing to known cardiac indices), or when aggregating multimodal data from different sources (e.g. pooling together MRI and CT data). To explore the properties of the learned factorisation, we perform latent-space arithmetic and show that we can synthesise CT from MR and vice versa, by swapping the modality factors. We also demonstrate that the factor holding image specific information can be used to predict the input modality with high accuracy. Code will be made available at https://github.com/agis85/anatomy_modality_decomposition.

Alejandro Ungría Hirte, Moritz Platscher, Thomas Joyce et al.

We show that high quality, diverse and realistic-looking diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance images can be synthesized using deep generative models. Based on professional neuroradiologists' evaluations and diverse metrics with respect to quality and diversity of the generated synthetic brain images, we present two networks, the Introspective Variational Autoencoder and the Style-Based GAN, that qualify for data augmentation in the medical field, where information is saved in a dispatched and inhomogeneous way and access to it is in many aspects restricted.

J. Michael Herrmann, Adam Erskine, Thomas Joyce

Particle swarm optimisation is a metaheuristic algorithm which finds reasonable solutions in a wide range of applied problems if suitable parameters are used. We study the properties of the algorithm in the framework of random dynamical systems which, due to the quasi-linear swarm dynamics, yields analytical results for the stability properties of the particles. Such considerations predict a relationship between the parameters of the algorithm that marks the edge between convergent and divergent behaviours. Comparison with simulations indicates that the algorithm performs best near this margin of instability.