# Real-Time Hardware-Free HIFU Interference Suppression via Teacher-Student Diffusion Framework

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01557 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.01557/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Sep 2025.

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

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [Elucidating the Design Space of Diffusion-Based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00364/) (2022)
- [Image Super-Resolution via Iterative Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07636/) (2021)
- [Swin-Unet: Unet-like Pure Transformer for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05537/) (2021)
- [One-step Diffusion with Distribution Matching Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18828/) (2023)
- [Simple Baselines for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04676/) (2022)
- [Designing a Practical Degradation Model for Deep Blind Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14006/) (2021)
- [ACDMSR: Accelerated Conditional Diffusion Models for Single Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00781/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

High-Intensity Focused Ultrasound (HIFU) is a non-invasive therapy, yet its safety is often degraded by severe acoustic interference during continuous ultrasound guidance. Conventional HIFU interference suppression methods heavily rely on proprietary raw Radio-Frequency (RF) data or complex hardware synchronization, limiting their clinical utility and preventing real-time implementation. To address this limitation, we propose Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections Diffusion (mHC-Diff), an image-domain diffusion framework for real-time interference suppression without specialized hardware synchronization, disentangling complex interference from anatomical structures while ensuring high reconstruction fidelity. To achieve clinical real-time application, our approach employs a two-stage strategy: (i) anatomy-aware prior acquisition, where a diffusion model is trained with multi-step UNet as a highfidelity Teacher; and (ii) efficiency distillation, where this prior is distilled into a one-step Student via knowledge distillation to achieve real-time throughput. Extensive validation on a clinically representative dataset across diverse therapeutic scenarios shows that mHC-Diff achieves superior restoration (26.65 dB PSNR), while enabling real-time inference (~20 FPS) on a single NVIDIA RTX 4090, providing a ~6.8x speedup over iterative diffusion baselines (e.g., HIFU-Diff). By eliminating the requirement for specialized hardware synchronization and proprietary RF access, this image-domain framework ensures compatibility and facilitates real-time interference suppression during ultrasound-guided HIFU interventions.