Sparse-View Lung Nodule Volumetry from Digitally Reconstructed Radiographs via AReT: Anatomy-Regularized TensoRF
Enables clinically viable sparse-view 3D reconstruction for lung nodule volumetry, addressing a key bottleneck in low-dose CT alternatives.
AReT resolves a failure mode in TensoRF for X-ray attenuation fields by setting density shift to zero, enabling accurate lung nodule volumetry from only three orthogonal X-ray projections. It achieves Pearson r=0.983 and median absolute volumetric error of 11.4% for nodules ≥10 mm.
We identify and resolve a previously unreported failure mode in TensoRF when applied to X-ray attenuation fields: the default density shift of -10, originally introduced for RGB scene reconstruction, suppresses density gradients and prevents sparse-view medical reconstruction regardless of learning rate or regularization strategy. Setting the density shift to zero restores gradient flow and enables stable volumetric reconstruction of pulmonary nodules from only three orthogonal X-ray projections. Building on this, we propose AReT, an anatomy-regularized tensorial radiance field framework for lung nodule reconstruction using coronal, sagittal, and axial projections from the LIDC-IDRI dataset (19 patients, radiologist-annotated nodules). Unlike existing NeRF approaches requiring dense multi-view acquisition, AReT is designed for sparse-view thoracic imaging and incorporates chest-anatomy-aware regularization combining L1 sparsity and total variation smoothness. A systematic comparison across 11 reconstruction strategies shows anatomy-aware regularization consistently outperforms generative-prior-guided approaches. Evaluated against radiologist consensus segmentations, AReT achieves Pearson r=0.983 (p<0.0001) for clinically actionable nodules >=10 mm (n=14), median absolute volumetric error of 11.4%, near-zero systematic bias of -77.3 mm^3, and 8.4x improvement over spherical volume approximation.