# PhyDiCT: Plug-and-Play CT Reconstruction from Sparse X-Rays via Differentiable Rendering and Strong Priors

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09253 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.09253/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 3 of its 25 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Oct 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Generalist Foundation Models from a Multimodal Dataset for 3D Computed Tomography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17834/) (2024)
- [DVG-Diffusion: Dual-View Guided Diffusion Model for CT Reconstruction from X-Rays](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17804/) (2025)
- [X-Recon: Learning-based Patient-specific High-Resolution CT Reconstruction from Orthogonal X-Ray Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15356/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Reconstructing 3D Computed Tomography (CT) images from a few X-ray projections is a highly ill-posed inverse problem due to the loss of volumetric information. We propose PhyDiCT, a training-free framework that integrates a differentiable Physics-based forward model, grounded in the Beer-Lambert law, with a text-conditioned Diffusion as a strong prior to reconstruct 3D lung CT images. We refer to our approach as training-free since the prior model is used without fine-tuning, and our goal is to steer the denoising procedure to generate samples consistent with X-ray observations. We guide the diffusion generation using Split Gibbs sampling to jointly optimize for projection fidelity (reward) and consistency with prior knowledge. Also, we introduce a test-time refinement step that enhances image realism and anatomical coherence. We extensively evaluate our method on publicly available 3D CT datasets using both perceptual and semantic metrics, demonstrating that it surpasses existing plug-and-play diffusion and fully trained reconstruction approaches. Our findings highlight that combining a strong generative prior with the underlying physics of image formation substantially improves reconstruction quality, e.g., 7.5% improvement on SSIM compared to full training methods. Code will be released at https://github.com/batmanlab/PhyDiCT.