# Balancing Efficiency and Restoration: Lightweight Mamba-Based Model for CT Metal Artifact Reduction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.06622 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.06622/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Mamba for medical image analysis, one of 10 directions in State-space sequence models (S4, Mamba).
- Builds on 29 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Apr 2026.

## Placed in

- State-space sequence models (S4, Mamba) / [Mamba for medical image analysis](https://mlsanity.com/ssm/mamba-for-medical-image-analysis/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [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)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [Efficiently Modeling Long Sequences with Structured State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00396/) (2021)
- [Restormer: Efficient Transformer for High-Resolution Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09881/) (2021)
- [Transformers are SSMs: Generalized Models and Efficient Algorithms Through Structured State Space Duality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.21060/) (2024)
- [Vision Mamba: Efficient Visual Representation Learning with Bidirectional State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09417/) (2024)
- [PVT v2: Improved Baselines with Pyramid Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13797/) (2021)
- [Improved Techniques for Training Consistency Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14189/) (2023)
- [MambaOut: Do We Really Need Mamba for Vision?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07992/) (2024)
- [Deep Learning to Segment Pelvic Bones: Large-scale CT Datasets and Baseline Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.08721/) (2020)
- [DeepLesion: Automated Deep Mining, Categorization and Detection of Significant Radiology Image Findings using Large-Scale Clinical Lesion Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.01766/) (2017)
- [InDuDoNet: An Interpretable Dual Domain Network for CT Metal Artifact Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05298/) (2021)
- [InDuDoNet+: A Deep Unfolding Dual Domain Network for Metal Artifact Reduction in CT Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12660/) (2021)
- [Adaptive Convolutional Dictionary Network for CT Metal Artifact Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07471/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised CT Metal Artifact Reduction by Plugging Diffusion Priors in Dual Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16742/) (2023)
- [IDOL-Net: An Interactive Dual-Domain Parallel Network for CT Metal Artifact Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01405/) (2021)
- [Orientation-Shared Convolution Representation for CT Metal Artifact Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.13166/) (2022)
- [MEPNet: A Model-Driven Equivariant Proximal Network for Joint Sparse-View Reconstruction and Metal Artifact Reduction in CT Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14274/) (2023)
- [Dense Transformer based Enhanced Coding Network for Unsupervised Metal Artifact Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12717/) (2023)
- [MARformer: An Efficient Metal Artifact Reduction Transformer for Dental CBCT Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09590/) (2023)
- [Deep learning based projection domain metal segmentation for metal artifact reduction in cone beam computed tomography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.08288/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In computed tomography imaging, metal implants frequently generate severe artifacts that compromise image quality and hinder diagnostic accuracy. There are three main challenges in the existing methods: the deterioration of organ and tissue structures, dependence on sinogram data, and an imbalance between resource use and restoration efficiency. Addressing these issues, we introduce MARMamba, which effectively eliminates artifacts caused by metals of different sizes while maintaining the integrity of the original anatomical structures of the image. Furthermore, this model only focuses on CT images affected by metal artifacts, thus negating the requirement for additional input data. The model is a streamlined UNet architecture, which incorporates multi-scale Mamba (MS-Mamba) as its core module. Within MS-Mamba, a flip mamba block captures comprehensive contextual information by analyzing images from multiple orientations. Subsequently, the average maximum feed-forward network integrates critical features with average features to suppress the artifacts. This combination allows MARMamba to reduce artifacts efficiently. The experimental results demonstrate that our model excels in reducing metal artifacts, offering distinct advantages over other models. It also strikes an optimal balance between computational demands, memory usage, and the number of parameters, highlighting its practical utility in the real world. The code of the presented model is available at: https://github.com/RICKand-MORTY/MARMamba.