# Limited-Angle Tomography Reconstruction via Projector Guided 3D Diffusion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06516 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06516/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 79 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Image Super-Resolution via Iterative Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07636/) (2021)
- [Diffusion Posterior Sampling for General Noisy Inverse Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14687/) (2022)
- [Zero-Shot Image Restoration Using Denoising Diffusion Null-Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00490/) (2022)
- [Solving Inverse Problems in Medical Imaging with Score-Based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.08005/) (2021)
- [MONAI: An open-source framework for deep learning in healthcare](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.02701/) (2022)
- [The Little Engine that Could: Regularization by Denoising (RED)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.02862/) (2016)
- [Med3D: Transfer Learning for 3D Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00625/) (2019)
- [Learned Primal-dual Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06474/) (2017)
- [Image reconstruction by domain transform manifold learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.08841/) (2017)
- [Generative Diffusion Prior for Unified Image Restoration and Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01247/) (2023)
- [Solving 3D Inverse Problems using Pre-trained 2D Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10655/) (2022)
- [DOLCE: A Model-Based Probabilistic Diffusion Framework for Limited-Angle CT Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12340/) (2022)
- [TomoGAN: Low-Dose Synchrotron X-Ray Tomography with Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07582/) (2019)
- [Deep Diffusion Image Prior for Efficient OOD Adaptation in 3D Inverse Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10641/) (2024)
- [Poisson Inverse Problems by the Plug-and-Play scheme](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02500/) (2015)
- [DPER: Diffusion Prior Driven Neural Representation for Limited Angle and Sparse View CT Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.17890/) (2024)
- [Physics-/Model-Based and Data-Driven Methods for Low-Dose Computed Tomography: A survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15725/) (2022)
- [Physics-informed Score-based Diffusion Model for Limited-angle Reconstruction of Cardiac Computed Tomography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14770/) (2024)
- [A Deep Learning Method for Simultaneous Denoising and Missing Wedge Reconstruction in Cryogenic Electron Tomography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05539/) (2023)
- [Glimpse: Generalized Locality for Scalable and Robust CT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00816/) (2024)
- [Advancing Limited-Angle CT Reconstruction Through Diffusion-Based Sinogram Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19385/) (2025)
- [RN-SDEs: Limited-Angle CT Reconstruction with Residual Null-Space Diffusion Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13930/) (2024)
- [Limited-angle x-ray nano-tomography with machine-learning enabled iterative reconstruction engine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19248/) (2025)
- [Data-Efficient Limited-Angle CT Using Deep Priors and Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12293/) (2025)
- [PWD: Prior-Guided and Wavelet-Enhanced Diffusion Model for Limited-Angle CT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05317/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Limited-angle electron tomography aims to reconstruct 3D shapes from 2D projections of Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) within a restricted range and number of tilting angles, but it suffers from the missing-wedge problem that causes severe reconstruction artifacts. Deep learning approaches have shown promising results in alleviating these artifacts, yet they typically require large high-quality training datasets with known 3D ground truth which are difficult to obtain in electron microscopy. To address these challenges, we propose TEMDiff, a novel 3D diffusion-based iterative reconstruction framework. Our method is trained on readily available volumetric FIB-SEM data using a simulator that maps them to TEM tilt series, enabling the model to learn realistic structural priors without requiring clean TEM ground truth. By operating directly on 3D volumes, TEMDiff implicitly enforces consistency across slices without the need for additional regularization. On simulated electron tomography datasets with limited angular coverage, TEMDiff outperforms state-of-the-art methods in reconstruction quality. We further demonstrate that a trained TEMDiff model generalizes well to real-world TEM tilts obtained under different conditions and can recover accurate structures from tilt ranges as narrow as 8 degrees, with 2-degree increments, without any retraining or fine-tuning.