Differentiable Score-Based Likelihoods: Learning CT Motion Compensation From Clean Images
This addresses motion correction in CT imaging for medical diagnostics, offering a robust solution that handles unforeseen motion variability, though it is incremental as it builds on existing score-based models.
The paper tackles motion artifacts in CT images by training a score-based model to estimate the probability density of clean head CT images, then using likelihood as a metric to optimize motion parameters and reduce artifacts, achieving performance comparable to state-of-the-art methods without needing motion-affected data.
Motion artifacts can compromise the diagnostic value of computed tomography (CT) images. Motion correction approaches require a per-scan estimation of patient-specific motion patterns. In this work, we train a score-based model to act as a probability density estimator for clean head CT images. Given the trained model, we quantify the deviation of a given motion-affected CT image from the ideal distribution through likelihood computation. We demonstrate that the likelihood can be utilized as a surrogate metric for motion artifact severity in the CT image facilitating the application of an iterative, gradient-based motion compensation algorithm. By optimizing the underlying motion parameters to maximize likelihood, our method effectively reduces motion artifacts, bringing the image closer to the distribution of motion-free scans. Our approach achieves comparable performance to state-of-the-art methods while eliminating the need for a representative data set of motion-affected samples. This is particularly advantageous in real-world applications, where patient motion patterns may exhibit unforeseen variability, ensuring robustness without implicit assumptions about recoverable motion types.