用结构引导和金属感知的流匹配,更精准还原金属伪影区域的解剖结构。
SCMA: Structure-Conditioned and Metal-Aware Flow Matching for CT Metal Artifact Reduction

- 基于样本结构条件与金属分布加权的流匹配方法
- 在真实和模拟数据上显著降低伪影且保留解剖细节
- 适合临床高精度CT重建,尤其对金属植入物患者
X射线CT中金属物体引发束硬化、光子匮乏和散射,导致投影不一致、条纹、暗带及结构扭曲,影响临床诊断与定量分析。现有金属伪影去除(MAR)方法存在局限:优化类方法残留伪影或模糊结构,回归网络泛化能力差,生成模型缺乏样本特异性结构引导与物理约束,易产生解剖不一致结构。流匹配通过连续时间速度场将源分布确定性地映射到目标分布,提供灵活的MAR先验。但标准无条件流匹配未利用样本特定结构、空间非均匀金属退化及实测投影。为此,提出SCMA框架:首先将线性插值修正图像与中间状态作为结构条件输入速度网络,指导推断向无伪影图像收敛并保留解剖结构;其次,引入金属掩码及其距离变换的时间可变空间权重,增强金属区域及周边严重退化部分的损失关注;最后,在推理中交替进行条件流匹配更新与投影一致性校正,利用金属外可靠测量约束预测结果。在模拟与真实CT数据上的实验表明,相比代表性MAR方法,SCMA能更有效抑制金属伪影,保持局部解剖结构,并减少与投影测量不符的幻觉结构。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
In X-ray CT, metallic objects cause beam hardening, photon starvation, and scattering, leading to projection inconsistency, streaks, dark bands, and structural distortions that compromise clinical diagnosis and quantitative analysis. Existing metal artifact reduction (MAR) methods remain limited: optimization-based methods may leave residual artifacts or blur structures, regression networks may generalize poorly across scenarios, and generative models without sample-specific structural guidance and physical constraints may produce anatomically inconsistent structures. Flow Matching learns a continuous-time velocity field that deterministically transports a source distribution to a target distribution, providing a flexible MAR prior. However, standard unconditional Flow Matching does not exploit sample-specific structure, spatially nonuniform metal-induced degradation, or measured projections. To address these limitations, we propose SCMA, a structure-conditioned and metal-aware Flow Matching framework. First, a linear-interpolation-corrected image is fed into the velocity network with the intermediate state as a sample-specific structural condition, guiding inference toward artifact-free CT images while preserving anatomy. Second, time-varying spatial weights from the metal mask and its distance transform are incorporated into the Flow Matching loss to emphasize severe degradation within and around metal regions. Finally, conditional Flow Matching updates alternate with projection-consistency correction during inference, allowing reliable measurements outside metal traces to constrain predictions. Experiments on simulated and real CT data demonstrate that SCMA more effectively suppresses metal artifacts, preserves local anatomical structures, and reduces hallucination-like structures inconsistent with projection measurements than representative MAR methods.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。