RA-CMF: Region-Adaptive Conditional MeanFlow for CT Image Reconstruction

The use of CT imaging is important for screening, diagnosis, therapy planning, and prognosis of lung cancers. Unfortunately, due to differences in imaging protocols and scanner models, CT images acquired by different means may show large differences in noise statistics, contrast, and texture. In this study, we develop a novel conditional MeanFlow pipeline for CT image reconstruction. We introduce a conditional MeanFlow network that models the reconstruction trajectory by predicting image-conditioned flow fields given intermediate image states. The image reconstruction network is trained with a MeanFlow consistency loss along with the image reconstruction loss. In order to provide a spatially adaptive refinement process, we integrate a regional reinforcement learning-driven policy network into our approach. The policy network receives information about the MeanFlow rollouts and provides predictions in terms of tile-wise refinement budgets, stopping criteria, and total budget allocation of refinement processes. Our policy network is trained through reinforcement learning in a policy gradient framework, where the goal of the training reward is to maximize reconstruction quality while minimizing unnecessary computations and avoiding instabilities. In this way, our approach combines conditional flow-based reconstruction with reinforcement learning-based spatial reconstruction control. Our results show high accuracy in the tumor ROI, with the average radiomic feature CCC being 0.93 ± 0.09, an average PSNR of 31.94 ± 2.64, and average SSIM of 0.97 ± 0.03. Moreover, there is an improvement in the overall quality of images, with an average PSNR of 34.23 ± 1.71 and average SSIM of 0.95 ± 0.01.