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

Abstract

Cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) is an 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 combining joint reconstruction and motion estimation (JRM) with an adaptive diffusion model (ADM) that simultaneously addresses motion compensation and sparse-view reconstruction in head cone-beam computed tomography (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 computed tomography (CT) volumes. Experimental results demonstrate that JRM-ADM achieves consistent quantitative improvements over both traditional and learning-based baselines. In highly undersampled cases, JRM-ADM improves peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) by more than 4 dB and structural similarity index measure (SSIM) by 0.10 compared to the baseline motion-corrected (MC) reconstruction method. These results highlight the potential of our approach to enable motion-robust, low-dose CBCT imaging, paving the way for improved clinical viability. The project page is available at https://antoinedepaepe.github.io/jrm-adm-io/.