SpectralCTGaussians: Projection-Domain Reconstruction and Basis Material Decomposition for Spectral CT using 3D Gaussian Splatting

Spectral computed tomography (CT) extends conventional CT by measuring attenuation across multiple energy channels, allowing improved modeling of physical X-ray interactions and energy-dependent material behavior and leading to richer scene understanding. We present a novel method for spectral CT reconstruction and basis material decomposition using 3D Gaussian Splatting by adding per-Gaussian basis material fractions to the set of learnable parameters, which together with a set of energy-dependent basis functions define the attenuation across the full spectral range. The basis functions represent various physical attenuation models such as photoelectric absorption and Compton scattering, and are jointly optimized across all energy channels through a differentiable polychromatic forward model, with material decomposition performed via mean-shift clustering of the resulting coefficients. We evaluate our method on a baseline real-world dataset as well as a synthetic dataset that we introduce, comparing against traditional reconstruction algorithms and state-of-the-art learning-based CT reconstruction methods. Our approach outperforms all traditional baselines in novel view synthesis and achieves the best PSNR among all compared methods for spectral CT volume reconstruction, while describing all energy channels with a single shared representation that requires a number of Gaussians comparable to single-channel Gaussian splatting-based CT reconstruction approaches. For basis material decomposition, no traditional or learning-based baseline offers one-step decomposition with direct RGB material segmentation, and our method additionally recovers the photoelectric basis with higher PSNR than traditional pipelines.