# Dense Transformer based Enhanced Coding Network for Unsupervised Metal Artifact Reduction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.12717 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12717/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 25 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Jul 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [SwinIR: Image Restoration Using Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10257/) (2021)
- [Image Super-Resolution Using Very Deep Residual Channel Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.02758/) (2018)
- [Residual Dense Network for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08797/) (2018)
- [Accurate Image Restoration with Attention Retractable Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01427/) (2022)
- [DuDoNet: Dual Domain Network for CT Metal Artifact Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.00273/) (2019)
- [Deep Sinogram Completion with Image Prior for Metal Artifact Reduction in CT Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07469/) (2020)
- [ADN: Artifact Disentanglement Network for Unsupervised Metal Artifact Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.01104/) (2019)
- [InDuDoNet+: A Deep Unfolding Dual Domain Network for Metal Artifact Reduction in CT Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12660/) (2021)
- [DAN-Net: Dual-Domain Adaptive-Scaling Non-local Network for CT Metal Artifact Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08003/) (2021)
- [U-DuDoNet: Unpaired dual-domain network for CT metal artifact reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04552/) (2021)
- [Orientation-Shared Convolution Representation for CT Metal Artifact Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.13166/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Radiologist-in-the-Loop Self-Training for Generalizable CT Metal Artifact Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15610/) (2025)
- [AC-IND: Sparse CT reconstruction based on attenuation coefficient estimation and implicit neural distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07171/) (2024)
- [Complex Style Image Transformations for Domain Generalization in Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00298/) (2024)
- [NAB: Neural Adaptive Binning for Sparse-View CT reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02356/) (2026)
- [Balancing Efficiency and Restoration: Lightweight Mamba-Based Model for CT Metal Artifact Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.06622/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

CT images corrupted by metal artifacts have serious negative effects on clinical diagnosis. Considering the difficulty of collecting paired data with ground truth in clinical settings, unsupervised methods for metal artifact reduction are of high interest. However, it is difficult for previous unsupervised methods to retain structural information from CT images while handling the non-local characteristics of metal artifacts. To address these challenges, we proposed a novel Dense Transformer based Enhanced Coding Network (DTEC-Net) for unsupervised metal artifact reduction. Specifically, we introduce a Hierarchical Disentangling Encoder, supported by the high-order dense process, and transformer to obtain densely encoded sequences with long-range correspondence. Then, we present a second-order disentanglement method to improve the dense sequence's decoding process. Extensive experiments and model discussions illustrate DTEC-Net's effectiveness, which outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods on a benchmark dataset, and greatly reduces metal artifacts while restoring richer texture details.