Cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) is widely used for image-guided radiotherapy, but reducing the number of projections to lower dose and scan time makes reconstruction increasingly ill-posed. We present EUReCA (End-to-end Unified REconstruction across Clinical Acquisitions), a geometry-aware feed-forward model for variable-view clinical linac CBCT. For a given acquisition trajectory, EUReCA accepts 8-100 projections with a single set of weights, without view-count-specific retraining; the same architecture and training recipe extend unchanged to other clinical trajectories. It combines learned projection features with an in-frame Feldkamp-Davis-Kress (FDK) reconstruction. The model encodes each projection with a shared multiscale backbone, back-projects features into multiresolution 3D grids using the acquisition geometry, aggregates variable numbers of views at fixed computational cost, and refines the volume with a global 3D transformer and multilevel decoder. On simulated data, EUReCA achieved 29.9-33.2 dB PSNR with 10-100 views and outperformed all applicable feed-forward baselines; it also exceeded iterative optimization-based methods while running orders of magnitude faster. On 15 measured patient CBCT scans evaluated against vendor reconstructions, EUReCA achieved the best performance at every tested view count. These results suggest that geometry-aware, measurement-anchored feed-forward reconstruction can provide a practical and flexible foundation for variable-view linac CBCT.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Method overview. (A) Geometry-aware lifting: each of the N projections is encoded by a shared pretrained backbone into a three-scale feature pyramid, and features at every scale are back-projected into 3D grids using the exact cone-beam geometry and pooled across views within angular sectors (Fig. 2 ). (B) Coarse-to-fine 3D decoder: the coarse volume is refined by a global transformer, then decoded through MLP and ×2 upsampling stages with multi-scale fusion to the final volume. (C) Analytic FDK reference: an in-frame FDK reconstruction of the same projections is encoded by a 3D CNN into the matching scale pyramid and merged into the decoder at every scale through gated fusion ( ⊗ ).
Figure 2: Variable-view angular pooling over fixed sectors. (A) The N view features extracted by the shared pretrained 2D network are organized into K=36 fixed angular sectors by gantry angle: views within a sector are pooled to one sector feature, each carrying its angle position code, and unobserved sectors are represented explicitly (empty token), yielding an angle-encoded sector-feature sequence whose length is independent of N . (B) Per 3D location, sectors are aggregated scale-specifically: at the coarse scale a transformer self-attends across sectors through a class (CLS) token; at the mid and fine scales learned mixing weights drive a softmax-weighted aggregate. The learned aggregate is combined with mean and max statistics by a learned 1×1×1 fusion into the feature grid.
Dataset
Region
Original
Filtered
Train
Val
Test
MELA
Thorax (mediastinum)
1,100
916
731
94
91
LUNA16
Thorax (lung)
880
611
489
60
62
RibFrac
Thorax (ribs)
660
618
503
60
55
AMOS22
Abdomen
2,383
796
654
75
67
RSNA-2023
Abdomen (trauma)
4,138
2,462
1,922
259
281
AbdomenAtlas
Abdomen
9,262
5,998
4,828
586
584
Table 3
Figure 3: Halcyon acquisition geometry. (a) The 211∘ half-scan arc (gantry −126∘ to 85∘ ), with the arc start free to rotate on the 360∘ circle and colored markers illustrating independent sparse view draws; (b) cone-beam projection geometry with source-to-axis DSO=1000 mm, source-to-detector DSD=1540 mm, a 256×256×128 reconstruction volume at 2.0 mm isotropic voxels, and a 1.12 mm detector pixel pitch.
Figure 4: Four additional clinical acquisitions — two orthogonal views, four fixed views, and 90∘ / 120∘ short arcs; markers show independent draws with the arc start free on the 360∘ circle. Each is trained with the same architecture and recipe; only the view-selection trajectory changes at data loading.
Figure 6: Qualitative comparison at 20 views (same case and layout as Fig. 5 ). Top: DIF-Net, DIF-Gaussian, ILV, ours, ground truth. Bottom: FDK, R 2 -Gaussian, IntraTomo, NAF, SAX-NeRF, ours, ground truth.
Figure 7: Qualitative comparison at 50 views (same case and layout as Fig. 5 ). Top: DIF-Net, DIF-Gaussian, ours, ground truth. Bottom: FDK, R 2 -Gaussian, IntraTomo, NAF, SAX-NeRF, ours, ground truth. ILV is not shown: it is trained per view count and no 50 -view model was trained.
Figure 8: Qualitative comparison at 100 views , measurement-driven methods and ours (same case as Fig. 5 ): FDK, R 2 -Gaussian, IntraTomo, NAF, ours, ground truth. No feed-forward baseline supports 100 views.
Acquisition
Views
PSNR (dB)
SSIM
Two orthogonal views
2
25.43
0.833
Four fixed views ( 0/45/90/135∘ )
4
28.23
0.879
90∘ short arc
15/30/45
27.84/28.36/28.71
0.882/0.893/0.900
120∘ short arc
15/30/45
29.12/29.91/30.05
0.896/0.911/0.913
Table 11
Method
Type
10 views
20 views
50 views
100 views
Ours
FF
25.75 / 0.780
26.44 / 0.806
26.94 / 0.829
27.24 / 0.841
ILV
FF
25.19 / 0.725
25.62 / 0.751
OOM
OOM
DIF-Net
FF
23.57 / 0.666
23.82 / 0.679
24.72 / 0.696
n/a
DIF-Gaussian
FF
24.28 / 0.665
23.19 / 0.557
22.53 / 0.506
n/a
FDK
MD
15.70 / 0.190
17.78 / 0.259
20.70 / 0.431
22.32 / 0.582
R 2 -Gaussian
MD
22.58 / 0.427
24.36 / 0.504
25.43 / 0.611
25.64 / 0.651
Table 12
Arm
Change vs. baseline (A0)
PSNR N=10/20/50
SSIM N=10/20/50
A0
baseline: render off, gradient on, FDK on
27.90/29.52/31.05
0.8646/0.8908/0.9161
A1
+ render (DRR consistency) loss
27.83/29.43/30.88
0.8704/0.8961/0.9199
A2
− multi-scale gradient (MAGA) loss
27.55/29.17/30.73
0.8664/0.8926/0.9184
A3
Zero out FDK reference (branch kept)
27.60/28.99/30.10
0.8653/0.8883/0.9085
Table 13
Figure 9: Convergence-matched data-size scaling. PSNR (a) and SSIM (b) versus number of unique training cases (log scale) at N=10/20/50 views, best-validation checkpoints.
Sparse-view cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) is severely under-constrained by limited X-ray projections. Learned reconstruction can provide complementary anatomical information, but using it as a prior in patient-specific Gaussian reconstruction introduces two challenges. First, the discrepancy between the learned prior and current reconstruction is spatially non-uniform: some local differences contain useful missing 3D information, whereas others reflect prior bias. Second, even a volumetrically beneficial correction can conflict with the observed X-ray measurements. Since X-ray measurements are line integrals, spatially separated corrections may affect overlapping rays, with their signed projection responses reinforcing or partially canceling in the measurement residual, so their feasibility cannot always be assessed independently. In this paper, we introduce RePrior, a multi-stage progressive prior-correction framework that addresses correction actionability, measurement feasibility, and representation expressivity. Selective Correction Proposal (SCP) first identifies actionable signed local corrections from prior--reconstruction discrepancies. Measurement-Constrained Reconciliation (MCR) then jointly enforces their consistency with patient-specific X-ray measurements, while Hybrid Residual Enhancement (HRE) recovers additional correction capacity through complementary voxel- and Gaussian-domain degrees of freedom around the reconciled anchor. RePrior requires neither test-time ground truth nor case-specific network fine-tuning. RePrior gains approximately 2.6~dB in 3D PSNR over R2-Gaussian across LUNA16, PANORAMA, and PENGWIN. Beyond prior-assisted reconstruction, it delivers additional gains in volumetric quality and observed-view projection fidelity, with consistent gains in held-out-view fidelity in the backbone-matched evaluation.
Mengrui Yin, Tianxingjian Ding, Wufan Zhao +2
University of Central Florida · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) · Tampere University +1
A long-term goal in CT imaging is to achieve fast and accurate 3D reconstruction from sparse-view projections, thereby reducing radiation exposure, lowering system cost, and enabling timely imaging in clinical workflows. Recent feed-forward approaches have shown strong potential toward this overarching goal, yet their results still suffer from artifacts and loss of fine details. In this work, we introduce Iterative Latent Volumes (ILV), a feed-forward framework that integrates data-driven priors with classical iterative reconstruction principles to overcome key limitations of prior feed-forward models in sparse-view CBCT reconstruction. At its core, ILV constructs an explicit 3D latent volume that is repeatedly updated by conditioning on multi-view X-ray features and the learned anatomical prior, enabling the recovery of fine structural details beyond the reach of prior feed-forward models. In addition, we develop and incorporate several key architectural components, including an X-ray feature volume, group cross-attention, efficient self-attention, and view-wise feature aggregation, that efficiently realize its core latent volume refinement concept. Extensive experiments on a large-scale dataset of approximately 14,000 CT volumes demonstrate that ILV significantly outperforms existing feed-forward and optimization-based methods in both reconstruction quality and speed. These results show that ILV enables fast and accurate sparse-view CBCT reconstruction suitable for clinical use. The project page is available at: https://sngryonglee.github.io/ILV/.
Four-dimensional cone-beam computed tomography (4D CBCT) provides phase-resolved volumetric images for image-guided radiotherapy. Yet good reconstruction quality usually needs many projections. This increases scan time and radiation dose. We propose STCNet, a sparse-view 4D CBCT reconstruction framework that uses spatial-temporal consistency learning. STCNet reconstructs high-quality images from only 16 projections in each respiratory phase. STCNet integrates physics-driven positional encoding to enforce geometric consistency in the projection domain and introduces temporal encoding in latent space to capture respiratory motion dynamics across phases to capture dynamic respiratory motion across phases. A dual-domain collaborative strategy jointly optimizes both projection and image domains, enhancing structural fidelity and temporal coherence. We tested STCNet on the TCIA-LUNG dataset and a CIRS thorax phantom dataset. STCNet performed better than conventional methods and recent deep learning baselines in image quality, artifact reduction, and structural preservation. On TCIA-LUNG, STCNet reached PSNR values of 33.311, 32.695, and 32.658 dB at phases 2, 5, and 8. The corresponding SSIM values were 0.845, 0.823, and 0.825. On CIRS, STCNet achieved PSNR values up to 36.497 dB and SSIM values up to 0.877. These results support STCNet as a promising framework for low-dose, phase-resolved 4D CBCT reconstruction in image-guided radiotherapy.