# Beyond the Lungs: Extending the Field of View in Chest CT with Latent Diffusion Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.13068 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13068/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Medical imaging and segmentation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 10 of its 22 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Jan 2025.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Medical imaging and segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/medical-imaging-and-segmentation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [RePaint: Inpainting using Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09865/) (2022)
- [TotalSegmentator: robust segmentation of 104 anatomical structures in CT images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.05868/) (2022)
- [MONAI: An open-source framework for deep learning in healthcare](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.02701/) (2022)
- [One Model to Synthesize Them All: Multi-contrast Multi-scale Transformer for Missing Data Imputation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13738/) (2022)
- [HACA3: A Unified Approach for Multi-site MR Image Harmonization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06065/) (2022)
- [Body Composition Assessment with Limited Field-of-view Computed Tomography: A Semantic Image Extension Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06551/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The interconnection between the human lungs and other organs, such as the liver and kidneys, is crucial for understanding the underlying risks and effects of lung diseases and improving patient care. However, most research chest CT imaging is focused solely on the lungs due to considerations of cost and radiation dose. This restricted field of view (FOV) in the acquired images poses challenges to comprehensive analysis and hinders the ability to gain insights into the impact of lung diseases on other organs. To address this, we propose SCOPE (Spatial Coverage Optimization with Prior Encoding), a novel approach to capture the inter-organ relationships from CT images and extend the FOV of chest CT images. Our approach first trains a variational autoencoder (VAE) to encode 2D axial CT slices individually, then stacks the latent representations of the VAE to form a 3D context for training a latent diffusion model. Once trained, our approach extends the FOV of CT images in the z-direction by generating new axial slices in a zero-shot manner. We evaluated our approach on the National Lung Screening Trial (NLST) dataset, and results suggest that it effectively extends the FOV to include the liver and kidneys, which are not completely covered in the original NLST data acquisition. Quantitative results on a held-out whole-body dataset demonstrate that the generated slices exhibit high fidelity with acquired data, achieving an SSIM of 0.81.