Differentiable Jitter Correction using Deep Learning-based Image Quality Metric for Phase-Contrast Micro-CT
Authors: Junan Chen, Yiting Jia, Joscha Maier, Dominik John, Sami Wirtensohn, Imke Greving, Silja Flenner, Matthias Wieczorek, +1 more
Abstract
This paper proposes a fully differentiable jitter correction method for X-ray phase-contrast micro computed tomography using a deep learning-based image quality metric that estimates and compensates per-projection rigid jitter directly from the acquired projection data, without a pre-scan motion-free reference. The approach builds on a gradient-based auto-focus strategy adapted to parallel-beam geometry. A set of candidate objective functions is benchmarked in a controlled study, and the sensitivity of the visual information fidelity (VIF) metric to the jitter artifact is verified with the target phase-contrast data. To operate without a clean reference, a compact 3D convolutional neural network is trained to predict the VIF score from a single corrupted volume. A spatially selective total variation penalty applied exclusively to the image background is introduced to penalize spurious high-frequency structures that otherwise emerge during optimization. Experiments on biological specimens acquired at different synchrotron beamlines are conducted. Evaluation uses jitter motion applied to simulated and experimentally acquired projection data. The result confirms that the integrated pipeline reliably recovers fine structural detail lost due to jitter, with generalization demonstrated across morphologically distinct samples.
X-ray micro-computed tomography (micro-CT) provides non-destructive three-dimensional (3D) imaging of porous material microstructures. In situ experiments, including mechanical loading and reactive transport, increasingly require dynamic four-dimensional (4D) imaging with volumes repeatedly acquired during experiments. However, rapid acquisition typically requires fewer projections, shorter exposures, or reduced fields of view, producing reconstructions with noise, blur, and artifacts that obscure pores, microcracks, and interfaces. To address this challenge, this study introduces InSituRes, a physics-informed same-grid volumetric enhancement framework for fast dynamic X-ray micro-CT imaging of temporally evolving materials. InSituRes maps fast-acquisition volumes to higher-quality long-acquisition reconstructions using paired scans of the same specimens. The model integrates 3D convolutional feature extraction with slice-wise transformer attention to capture local and broader in-plane context. A learnable forward degradation model approximates rapid acquisition effects, including spatial blurring, intensity scaling differences, and signal-dependent noise. During training, reconstructed volumes should match high-quality reference scans and reproduce observed fast acquisition data after propagation through the forward model, imposing a physics-guided consistency constraint. Experiments on unseen micro-CT datasets demonstrate improved reconstruction fidelity and enhanced visibility of fine microstructural features relative to conventional interpolation and learning-based enhancement approaches. The framework supports quantitative interpretation of fast 4D X-ray micro-CT scans of evolving materials.
Motion artifacts in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) degrade diagnostic reliability. Existing deep learning methods are typically contrast-specific and fail to generalize across diverse modalities and artifact severities. We propose a unified framework combining parameter-informed contrast disentanglement with severity-aware adaptive correction. ScanCLIP, pretrained on over 30,000 MRI text-image pairs, derives contrast embeddings from acquisition parameters to disentangle contrast style from anatomical content, yielding contrast-free features. A Vision Transformer then estimates motion severity and routes features through a Mixture-of-Experts network, enabling targeted artifact correction. A dual-pathway decoder reconstructs both the clean image and residual artifact map, enforcing image-space consistency. On IXI and HCP benchmarks, our method improves PSNR by 0.75 dB and SSIM by up to 0.0279 over state-of-the-art approaches, with larger gains at higher artifact severities. It further demonstrates robust zero-shot generalization on real-world clinical data acquired with unseen scanning parameters, where existing methods either fail to remove artifacts or introduce additional distortions.
Ptychography neural networks suffer from scaling inconsistencies when generalizing out of distribution, limiting their real world viability. We address this scaling mismatch using a factorization strategy which decouples the learned object texture from measurement scaling, enabling a single trained network to produce measurement-consistent reconstructions across varying illumination conditions. This requires predicting the learned object in real and imaginary units instead of the canonical amplitude and phase representation. We additionally introduce a synthetic object sampling strategy that minimizes phase distribution mismatch between synthetic training data and experimental targets. These improvements yield up to a 5x reduction in Fourier error over the previous PtychoPINN-torch baseline across 5 experimental datasets spanning multiple beamlines and facilities.