Learning 3D Gaussians for Extremely Sparse-View Cone-Beam CT Reconstruction
This addresses radiation dose reduction in medical imaging for clinical practice, offering an incremental improvement over existing neural representation methods.
The paper tackles sparse-view cone-beam CT reconstruction to reduce radiation exposure by proposing DIF-Gaussian, a framework using 3D Gaussians for feature representation, which achieves significantly superior performance on public datasets compared to prior state-of-the-art methods.
Cone-Beam Computed Tomography (CBCT) is an indispensable technique in medical imaging, yet the associated radiation exposure raises concerns in clinical practice. To mitigate these risks, sparse-view reconstruction has emerged as an essential research direction, aiming to reduce the radiation dose by utilizing fewer projections for CT reconstruction. Although implicit neural representations have been introduced for sparse-view CBCT reconstruction, existing methods primarily focus on local 2D features queried from sparse projections, which is insufficient to process the more complicated anatomical structures, such as the chest. To this end, we propose a novel reconstruction framework, namely DIF-Gaussian, which leverages 3D Gaussians to represent the feature distribution in the 3D space, offering additional 3D spatial information to facilitate the estimation of attenuation coefficients. Furthermore, we incorporate test-time optimization during inference to further improve the generalization capability of the model. We evaluate DIF-Gaussian on two public datasets, showing significantly superior reconstruction performance than previous state-of-the-art methods.