2024/12/08 by Qing Wu, Hongjiang Wei, Wu, Qing +5 · 1 citation
Engineering · Medicine · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced X-ray Imaging Techniques #Advanced X-ray and CT Imaging #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Image and Video Processing (eess.IV) #Medical Imaging Techniques and Applications #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2412.05853
openalex publication_date 2024/12/08 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Ring artifacts are prevalent in 3D cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) due to non-ideal responses of X-ray detectors, substantially affecting image quality and diagnostic reliability. Existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) ring artifact reduction (RAR) methods rely on supervised learning with large-scale paired CT datasets. While effective in-domain, supervised methods tend to struggle to fully capture the physical characteristics of ring artifacts, leading to pronounced performance drops in complex real-world acquisitions. Moreover, their scalability to 3D CBCT is limited by high memory demands. In this work, we propose Riner, a new unsupervised RAR method. Based on a theoretical analysis of ring artifact formation, we reformulate RAR as a multi-parameter inverse problem, where the non-ideal responses of X-ray detectors are parameterized as solvable physical variables. Using a new differentiable forward model, Riner can jointly learn the implicit neural representation of artifact-free images and estimate the physical parameters directly from CT measurements, without external training data. Additionally, Riner is memory-friendly due to its ray-based optimization, enhancing its usability in large-scale 3D CBCT. Experiments on both simulated and real-world datasets show Riner outperforms existing SOTA supervised methods.