# Where Should the Gaussians Go? Reusable Label-Aware Allocation for Budget-Constrained Gaussian Splatting of Cinematic CT

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20397 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.20397/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 23 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Oct 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [pixelSplat: 3D Gaussian Splats from Image Pairs for Scalable Generalizable 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12337/) (2023)
- [MONAI: An open-source framework for deep learning in healthcare](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.02701/) (2022)
- [LightGaussian: Unbounded 3D Gaussian Compression with 15x Reduction and 200+ FPS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17245/) (2023)
- [Compact 3D Gaussian Representation for Radiance Field](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13681/) (2023)
- [Taming 3DGS: High-Quality Radiance Fields with Limited Resources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15643/) (2024)
- [DDGS-CT: Direction-Disentangled Gaussian Splatting for Realistic Volume Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02518/) (2024)
- [7DGS: Unified Spatial-Temporal-Angular Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07946/) (2025)
- [XClipGS: Exact Half-Space Clipping for Medical Volume Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.07760/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Anatomical labels help 3D Gaussian splatting preserve vessels in cinematic renderings of CT, but the representation is still found by optimising each patient's scene, where densification decides where Gaussians go, while real-time displays cap their number. We address one part of this process: deciding where a fixed budget of B Gaussians should be placed. We propose a reusable, labelaware allocation front end that maps a patient's CT, labels and transfer function to a density over 2mm cells and draws exactly B positions from it without per-patient optimisation; the other Gaussian attributes are still fitted per patient. The front end is learned once from per-patient optimised scenes and implemented as a population-trained neural prior and an interpretable seven-parameter visibility-aware closed form (VACF). With identical attribute fitting on 20 held-out patients at 10K-100K Gaussians, both raise vessel-masked PSNR over uniform allocation by 4.5-7.1dB and over pruning a dense voxel-aligned model by 1.6-3.3dB. The neural prior does not differ significantly from per-patient optimised allocation at any budget, and VACF is within 0.6dB of it on vessels; on 19 external patients the neural prior again matches it on vessels and VACF is within 0.7dB. As an initialisation for position optimisation, VACF allocation beats per-patient densification on vessels at 10K Gaussians and, at 25K, reaches a higher vessel PSNR after 118s of optimisation than densification after 248s. Under altered rendering presets, VACF transfers to new colours and lighting but not to a label-free transfer function, whereas the neural prior shows the opposite pattern.