Adaptive Diffusion Models for Sparse-View Motion-Corrected Head Cone-beam CT.

Abstract

Cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) is a imaging modality widely used in head and neck diagnostics due to its accessibility and lower radiation dose. However, its relatively long acquisition times make it susceptible to patient motion, especially under sparse-view settings used to reduce dose, which can result in severe image artifacts. In this work, we propose a novel framework, joint reconstruction and motion estimation (JRM) with adaptive diffusion model (ADM), that simultaneously addresses motion compensation and sparse-view reconstruction in head CBCT. Leveraging recent advances in diffusion-based generative models, our method integrates a wavelet-domain diffusion prior into an iterative reconstruction pipeline to guide the solution toward anatomically plausible volumes while estimating rigid motion parameters in a blind fashion. We evaluate our method on simulated motion-affected CBCT data derived from real clinical CT volumes. Experimental results demonstrate that JRM-ADM substantially improves reconstruction quality over traditional model-based and learning-based baselines, particularly in highly undersampled scenarios. Our approach enables motion-robust and low-dose CBCT imaging, paving the way for improved clinical viability.

Figure 1: Overview of the proposed JRM-ADM method.

JRM-ADM for Sparse-View Motion-Corrected Head Cone-beam CT.

Figure 3: Ground truth and reconstructed volumes (axial plane) for motion affected sparse-view CBCT: results are shown for 60-, 40-, and 20-view acquisition settings.

BibTeX

@article{de2025adaptive,
      title={Adaptive Diffusion Models for Sparse-View Motion-Corrected Head Cone-beam CT},
      author={De Paepe, Antoine and Bousse, Alexandre and Phung-Ngoc, Cl{\'e}mentine and Mellak, Youness and Visvikis, Dimitris},
      journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.14033},
      year={2025}
    }