REGAS: REspiratory-GAted Synthesis of Views for Multi-Phase CBCT Reconstruction from a single 3D CBCT Acquisition

Abstract: It is a long-standing challenge to reconstruct Cone Beam Computed Tomography (CBCT) of the lung under respiratory motion. This work takes a step further to address a challenging setting in reconstructing a multi-phase}4D lung image from just a single}3D CBCT acquisition. To this end, we introduce REpiratory-GAted Synthesis of views, or REGAS. REGAS proposes a self-supervised method to synthesize the undersampled tomographic views and mitigate aliasing artifacts in reconstructed images. This method allows a much better estimation of between-phase Deformation Vector Fields (DVFs), which are used to enhance reconstruction quality from direct observations without synthesis. To address the large memory cost of deep neural networks on high resolution 4D data, REGAS introduces a novel Ray Path Transformation (RPT) that allows for distributed, differentiable forward projections. REGAS require no additional measurements like prior scans, air-flow volume, or breathing velocity. Our extensive experiments show that REGAS significantly outperforms comparable methods in quantitative metrics and visual quality.