# CT Reconstruction from Few Planar X-rays with Application towards Low-resource Radiotherapy

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.02100 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02100/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 25 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Implicit Neural Representations with Periodic Activation Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09661/) (2020)
- [Fourier Features Let Networks Learn High Frequency Functions in Low Dimensional Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10739/) (2020)
- [pixelNeRF: Neural Radiance Fields from One or Few Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02190/) (2020)
- [VoxelMorph: A Learning Framework for Deformable Medical Image Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.05231/) (2018)
- [Neural Fields in Visual Computing and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11426/) (2021)
- [Validation, comparison, and combination of algorithms for automatic detection of pulmonary nodules in computed tomography images: the LUNA16 challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08012/) (2016)
- [NeRP: Implicit Neural Representation Learning with Prior Embedding for Sparsely Sampled Image Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10991/) (2021)
- [NAF: Neural Attenuation Fields for Sparse-View CBCT Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14540/) (2022)
- [X2CT-GAN: Reconstructing CT from Biplanar X-Rays with Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.06902/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [DIFR3CT: Latent Diffusion for Probabilistic 3D CT Reconstruction from Few Planar X-Rays](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15118/) (2024)
- [Metric-Guided Conformal Bounds for Probabilistic Image Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15274/) (2024)
- [Accurate Patient Alignment without Unnecessary Imaging Dose via Synthesizing Patient-specific 3D CT Images from 2D kV Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19338/) (2024)
- [Bias-Aware Conformal Prediction for Metric-Based Imaging Pipelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05263/) (2024)
- [Intensity Field Decomposition for Tissue-Guided Neural Tomography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00900/) (2024)
- [SPIDER: Structure-Preferential Implicit Deep Network for Biplanar X-ray Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04684/) (2025)
- [Latent Space Consistency for Sparse-View CT Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.11152/) (2025)
- [Multi-Pass, Multi-View Blended Learning for High-Fidelity Volumetric CT Synthesis from Chest X-Rays](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.09920/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

CT scans are the standard-of-care for many clinical ailments, and are needed for treatments like external beam radiotherapy. Unfortunately, CT scanners are rare in low and mid-resource settings due to their costs. Planar X-ray radiography units, in comparison, are far more prevalent, but can only provide limited 2D observations of the 3D anatomy. In this work, we propose a method to generate CT volumes from few (<5) planar X-ray observations using a prior data distribution, and perform the first evaluation of such a reconstruction algorithm for a clinical application: radiotherapy planning. We propose a deep generative model, building on advances in neural implicit representations to synthesize volumetric CT scans from few input planar X-ray images at different angles. To focus the generation task on clinically-relevant features, our model can also leverage anatomical guidance during training (via segmentation masks). We generated 2-field opposed, palliative radiotherapy plans on thoracic CTs reconstructed by our method, and found that isocenter radiation dose on reconstructed scans have <1% error with respect to the dose calculated on clinically acquired CTs using <=4 X-ray views. In addition, our method is better than recent sparse CT reconstruction baselines in terms of standard pixel and structure-level metrics (PSNR, SSIM, Dice score) on the public LIDC lung CT dataset. Code is available at: https://github.com/wanderinrain/Xray2CT.
