# Direct Dual-Energy CT Material Decomposition using Model-based Denoising Diffusion Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.18012 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18012/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Medical imaging and segmentation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 16 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Jul 2025.

## Placed in

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

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

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05600/) (2019)
- [Palette: Image-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05826/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Restoration Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11793/) (2022)
- [Solving Inverse Problems in Medical Imaging with Score-Based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.08005/) (2021)
- [Improving Diffusion Models for Inverse Problems using Manifold Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00941/) (2022)
- [Denoising Diffusion Models for Plug-and-Play Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08995/) (2023)
- [Diffusion models as plug-and-play priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09012/) (2022)
- [Equivariant Imaging: Learning Beyond the Range Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14756/) (2021)
- [Physics-/Model-Based and Data-Driven Methods for Low-Dose Computed Tomography: A survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15725/) (2022)
- [Systematic Review on Learning-based Spectral CT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07588/) (2023)
- [A material decomposition method for dual-energy CT via dual interactive Wasserstein generative adversarial networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11247/) (2020)
- [Regularization by Denoising Sub-sampled Newton Method for Spectral CT Multi-Material Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13909/) (2021)
- [DIRECT-Net: a unified mutual-domain material decomposition network for quantitative dual-energy CT imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08331/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [A Dual-domain Refinement Network with FBP-based Jacobian Learning for Sparse-view Dual-Energy CT Material Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.30159/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Dual-energy X-ray Computed Tomography (DECT) constitutes an advanced technology which enables automatic decomposition of materials in clinical images without manual segmentation using the dependency of the X-ray linear attenuation with energy. However, most methods perform material decomposition in the image domain as a post-processing step after reconstruction but this procedure does not account for the beam-hardening effect and it results in sub-optimal results. In this work, we propose a deep learning procedure called Dual-Energy Decomposition Model-based Diffusion (DEcomp-MoD) for quantitative material decomposition which directly converts the DECT projection data into material images. The algorithm is based on incorporating the knowledge of the spectral DECT model into the deep learning training loss and combining a score-based denoising diffusion learned prior in the material image domain. Importantly the inference optimization loss takes as inputs directly the sinogram and converts to material images through a model-based conditional diffusion model which guarantees consistency of the results. We evaluate the performance with both quantitative and qualitative estimation of the proposed DEcomp-MoD method on synthetic DECT sinograms from the low-dose AAPM dataset. Finally, we show that DEcomp-MoD outperform state-of-the-art unsupervised score-based model and supervised deep learning networks, with the potential to be deployed for clinical diagnosis.