# Unlocking the Potential of Early Epochs: Uncertainty-aware CT Metal Artifact Reduction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.12186 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12186/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Deep Image Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10925/) (2017)
- [DuDoNet: Dual Domain Network for CT Metal Artifact Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.00273/) (2019)
- [Deep Learning to Segment Pelvic Bones: Large-scale CT Datasets and Baseline Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.08721/) (2020)
- [Deep Lesion Graphs in the Wild: Relationship Learning and Organization of Significant Radiology Image Findings in a Diverse Large-scale Lesion Database](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10535/) (2017)
- [Deep Sinogram Completion with Image Prior for Metal Artifact Reduction in CT Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07469/) (2020)
- [InDuDoNet: An Interpretable Dual Domain Network for CT Metal Artifact Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05298/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised CT Metal Artifact Reduction by Plugging Diffusion Priors in Dual Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16742/) (2023)
- [ImplantFormer: Vision Transformer based Implant Position Regression Using Dental CBCT Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.16467/) (2022)
- [Two-Stream Regression Network for Dental Implant Position Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10044/) (2023)
- [TCEIP: Text Condition Embedded Regression Network for Dental Implant Position Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14406/) (2023)
- [Quad-Net: Quad-domain Network for CT Metal Artifact Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11678/) (2022)
- [TCSloT: Text Guided 3D Context and Slope Aware Triple Network for Dental Implant Position Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05355/) (2023)
- [Metal Artifact Reduction in 2D CT Images with Self-supervised Cross-domain Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13483/) (2021)
- [Simplify Implant Depth Prediction as Video Grounding: A Texture Perceive Implant Depth Prediction Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04603/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In computed tomography (CT), the presence of metallic implants in patients often leads to disruptive artifacts in the reconstructed images, hindering accurate diagnosis. Recently, a large amount of supervised deep learning-based approaches have been proposed for metal artifact reduction (MAR). However, these methods neglect the influence of initial training weights. In this paper, we have discovered that the uncertainty image computed from the restoration result of initial training weights can effectively highlight high-frequency regions, including metal artifacts. This observation can be leveraged to assist the MAR network in removing metal artifacts. Therefore, we propose an uncertainty constraint (UC) loss that utilizes the uncertainty image as an adaptive weight to guide the MAR network to focus on the metal artifact region, leading to improved restoration. The proposed UC loss is designed to be a plug-and-play method, compatible with any MAR framework, and easily adoptable. To validate the effectiveness of the UC loss, we conduct extensive experiments on the public available Deeplesion and CLINIC-metal dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that the UC loss further optimizes the network training process and significantly improves the removal of metal artifacts.