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Jianing Sun

Publications and source records attributed to Jianing Sun.

11 recordsLinked to original sources

SCMA: Structure-Conditioned and Metal-Aware Flow Matching for CT Metal Artifact Reduction

In X-ray CT, metallic objects cause beam hardening, photon starvation, and scattering, leading to projection inconsistency, streaks, dark bands, and structural distortions that compromise clinical diagnosis and quantitative analysis. Existing metal artifact reduction (MAR) methods remain limited: optimization-based methods may leave residual artifacts or blur structures, regression networks may generalize poorly across scenarios, and generative models without sample-specific structural guidance and physical constraints may produce anatomically inconsistent structures. Flow Matching learns a continuous-time velocity field that deterministically transports a source distribution to a target distribution, providing a flexible MAR prior. However, standard unconditional Flow Matching does not exploit sample-specific structure, spatially nonuniform metal-induced degradation, or measured projections. To address these limitations, we propose SCMA, a structure-conditioned and metal-aware Flow Matching framework. First, a linear-interpolation-corrected image is fed into the velocity network with the intermediate state as a sample-specific structural condition, guiding inference toward artifact-free CT images while preserving anatomy. Second, time-varying spatial weights from the metal mask and its distance transform are incorporated into the Flow Matching loss to emphasize severe degradation within and around metal regions. Finally, conditional Flow Matching updates alternate with projection-consistency correction during inference, allowing reliable measurements outside metal traces to constrain predictions. Experiments on simulated and real CT data demonstrate that SCMA more effectively suppresses metal artifacts, preserves local anatomical structures, and reduces hallucination-like structures inconsistent with projection measurements than representative MAR methods.

cs.CV

Joint-decoupled iterative CBCT reconstruction with hybrid scatter estimation and voxel-adaptive beam hardening correction

Cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) is fundamentally challenged by scatter and beam hardening artifacts, which originate from X-ray scattering and the polychromatic nature of the X-ray spectrum, respectively. These two types of artifacts are intricately coupled in reconstructed images and manifest with similar streaking and cupping features, severely compromising high-precision CBCT imaging. This paper proposes a physics-driven iterative framework rooted in the polychromatic Polyquant attenuation model, which decouples these artifacts by establishing an optimization loop between scatter estimation and relative electron density (RED) reconstruction. We develop a hybrid strategy for scatter estimation, in which the first-order scattering component is analytically derived based on a polychromatic physical model to preserve high-frequency structural information, whereas the smoother multiple scattering component is efficiently estimated via an object-adaptive convolution module. Subsequently, for beam-hardening correction, we introduce a voxel-adaptive update mechanism that solves linearized, scatter-corrected polychromatic equations to derive optimal weights, enabling direct RED refinement without manual parameter tuning. The proposed method was validated through comprehensive studies on biomedical phantoms, utilizing both Monte Carlo simulations and physical experiments. Representative results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art techniques, with the mean relative error decreased from 11.96\% to 1.27\% for the anthropomorphic head phantom and from 12.55\% to 5.46\% for the physical Yin-Yang phantom.

physics.med-ph

Physics-Inspired Gaussian Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks for X-ray Scatter Correction in Cone-Beam CT

Cone-beam CT (CBCT) employs a flat-panel detector to achieve three-dimensional imaging with high spatial resolution. However, CBCT is susceptible to scatter during data acquisition, which introduces CT value bias and reduced tissue contrast in the reconstructed images, ultimately degrading diagnostic accuracy. To address this issue, we propose a deep learning-based scatter artifact correction method inspired by physical prior knowledge. Leveraging the fact that the observed point scatter probability density distribution exhibits rotational symmetry in the projection domain. The method uses Gaussian Radial Basis Functions (RBF) to model the point scatter function and embeds it into the Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KAN) layer, which provides efficient nonlinear mapping capabilities for learning high-dimensional scatter features. By incorporating the physical characteristics of the scattered photon distribution together with the complex function mapping capacity of KAN, the model improves its ability to accurately represent scatter. The effectiveness of the method is validated through both synthetic and real-scan experiments. Experimental results show that the model can effectively correct the scatter artifacts in the reconstructed images and is superior to the current methods in terms of quantitative metrics.

cs.CV

A Comprehensive Scatter Correction Model for Micro-Focus Dual-Source Imaging Systems: Combining Ambient, Cross, and Forward Scatter

Compared to single-source imaging systems, dual-source imaging systems equipped with two cross-distributed scanning beams significantly enhance temporal resolution and capture more comprehensive object scanning information. Nevertheless, the interaction between the two scanning beams introduces more complex scatter signals into the acquired projection data. Existing methods typically model these scatter signals as the sum of cross-scatter and forward scatter, with cross-scatter estimation limited to single-scatter along primary paths. Through experimental measurements on our selfdeveloped micro-focus dual-source imaging system, we observed that the peak ratio of hardware-induced ambient scatter to single-source projection intensity can even exceed 60%, a factor often overlooked in conventional models. To address this limitation, we propose a more comprehensive model that decomposes the total scatter signals into three distinct components: ambient scatter, cross-scatter, and forward scatter. Furthermore, we introduce a cross-scatter kernel superposition (xSKS) module to enhance the accuracy of cross-scatter estimation by modeling both single and multiple crossscatter events along non-primary paths. Additionally, we employ a fast object-adaptive scatter kernel superposition (FOSKS) module for efficient forward scatter estimation. In Monte Carlo (MC) simulation experiments performed on a custom-designed waterbone phantom, our model demonstrated remarkable superiority, achieving a scatter-toprimary-weighted mean absolute percentage error (SPMAPE) of 1.32%, significantly lower than the 12.99% attained by the state-of-the-art method. Physical experiments further validate the superior performance of our model in correcting scatter artifacts.

physics.med-ph

First performance of hybrid spectra CT reconstruction: a general Spectrum-Model-Aided Reconstruction Technique (SMART)

Hybrid spectral CT integrates energy integrating detectors (EID) and photon counting detectors (PCD) into a single system, combining the large field-of-view advantage of EID with the high energy and spatial resolution of PCD. This represents a new research direction in spectral CT imaging. However, the different imaging principles and inconsistent geometric paths of the two detectors make it difficult to reconstruct images using data from hybrid detectors. In addition, the quality reconstructed images considering spectrum is affected by the accuracy of spectral estimation and the scattered photons. In this work, Firstly, we propose a general hybrid spectral reconstruction method that takes into account both the spectral CT imaging principles of the two different detectors and the influence of scattered photons in the forward process modelling. Furthermore, we also apply volume fraction constraints to the results reconstructed from the two detector data. By alternately solving the spectral estimation and the spectral image reconstruction by the ADMM method, the estimated spectra and the reconstructed images reinforce each other, thus improving the accuracy of the spectral estimation and the quality of the reconstructed images. The proposed method is the first to achieve hybrid spectral CT reconstruction for both detectors, allowing simultaneous recovery of spectrum and image reconstruction from hybrid spectral data containing scattering. In addition, the method is also applicable to spectral CT imaging using a single type of detector. We validated the effectiveness of the proposed method through numerical experiments and successfully performed the first hybrid spectral CT reconstruction experiment on our self-developed hybrid spectral CT system.

physics.med-ph

Node Copying: A Random Graph Model for Effective Graph Sampling

There has been an increased interest in applying machine learning techniques on relational structured-data based on an observed graph. Often, this graph is not fully representative of the true relationship amongst nodes. In these settings, building a generative model conditioned on the observed graph allows to take the graph uncertainty into account. Various existing techniques either rely on restrictive assumptions, fail to preserve topological properties within the samples or are prohibitively expensive for larger graphs. In this work, we introduce the node copying model for constructing a distribution over graphs. Sampling of a random graph is carried out by replacing each node's neighbors by those of a randomly sampled similar node. The sampled graphs preserve key characteristics of the graph structure without explicitly targeting them. Additionally, sampling from this model is extremely simple and scales linearly with the nodes. We show the usefulness of the copying model in three tasks. First, in node classification, a Bayesian formulation based on node copying achieves higher accuracy in sparse data settings. Second, we employ our proposed model to mitigate the effect of adversarial attacks on the graph topology. Last, incorporation of the model in a recommendation system setting improves recall over state-of-the-art methods.

stat.ML

Rank-One Prior: Toward Real-Time Scene Recovery

Scene recovery is a fundamental imaging task for several practical applications, e.g., video surveillance and autonomous vehicles, etc. To improve visual quality under different weather/imaging conditions, we propose a real-time light correction method to recover the degraded scenes in the cases of sandstorms, underwater, and haze. The heart of our work is that we propose an intensity projection strategy to estimate the transmission. This strategy is motivated by a straightforward rank-one transmission prior. The complexity of transmission estimation is $O(N)$ where $N$ is the size of the single image. Then we can recover the scene in real-time. Comprehensive experiments on different types of weather/imaging conditions illustrate that our method outperforms competitively several state-of-the-art imaging methods in terms of efficiency and robustness.

cs.CV

Multi-Graph Convolution Collaborative Filtering

Personalized recommendation is ubiquitous, playing an important role in many online services. Substantial research has been dedicated to learning vector representations of users and items with the goal of predicting a user's preference for an item based on the similarity of the representations. Techniques range from classic matrix factorization to more recent deep learning based methods. However, we argue that existing methods do not make full use of the information that is available from user-item interaction data and the similarities between user pairs and item pairs. In this work, we develop a graph convolution-based recommendation framework, named Multi-Graph Convolution Collaborative Filtering (Multi-GCCF), which explicitly incorporates multiple graphs in the embedding learning process. Multi-GCCF not only expressively models the high-order information via a partite user-item interaction graph, but also integrates the proximal information by building and processing user-user and item-item graphs. Furthermore, we consider the intrinsic difference between user nodes and item nodes when performing graph convolution on the bipartite graph. We conduct extensive experiments on four publicly accessible benchmarks, showing significant improvements relative to several state-of-the-art collaborative filtering and graph neural network-based recommendation models. Further experiments quantitatively verify the effectiveness of each component of our proposed model and demonstrate that the learned embeddings capture the important relationship structure.

cs.IR

Memory Augmented Graph Neural Networks for Sequential Recommendation

The chronological order of user-item interactions can reveal time-evolving and sequential user behaviors in many recommender systems. The items that users will interact with may depend on the items accessed in the past. However, the substantial increase of users and items makes sequential recommender systems still face non-trivial challenges: (1) the hardness of modeling the short-term user interests; (2) the difficulty of capturing the long-term user interests; (3) the effective modeling of item co-occurrence patterns. To tackle these challenges, we propose a memory augmented graph neural network (MA-GNN) to capture both the long- and short-term user interests. Specifically, we apply a graph neural network to model the item contextual information within a short-term period and utilize a shared memory network to capture the long-range dependencies between items. In addition to the modeling of user interests, we employ a bilinear function to capture the co-occurrence patterns of related items. We extensively evaluate our model on five real-world datasets, comparing with several state-of-the-art methods and using a variety of performance metrics. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our model for the task of Top-K sequential recommendation.

cs.IR

FoodTracker: A Real-time Food Detection Mobile Application by Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

We present a mobile application made to recognize food items of multi-object meal from a single image in real-time, and then return the nutrition facts with components and approximate amounts. Our work is organized in two parts. First, we build a deep convolutional neural network merging with YOLO, a state-of-the-art detection strategy, to achieve simultaneous multi-object recognition and localization with nearly 80% mean average precision. Second, we adapt our model into a mobile application with extending function for nutrition analysis. After inferring and decoding the model output in the app side, we present detection results that include bounding box position and class label in either real-time or local mode. Our model is well-suited for mobile devices with negligible inference time and small memory requirements with a deep learning algorithm.

cs.CV

From Monomers to Self-Assembled Monolayers: The Evolution of Molecular Mobility with Structural Confinements

The effect of structural constriction on molecular mobility is investigated by broadband dielectric spectroscopy (BDS) within three types of molecular arrangements: monomers, oligomers and self-assembled monolayers (SAMs). While disordered monomers exhibit a variety of cooperative and local relaxation processes, the constrained nanodomains of oligomers and highly ordered structure of monolayers exhibit much hindered local molecular fluctuations. Particularly, in SAMs, motions of the silane headgroups are totally prevented whereas the polar endgroups forming the monolayer canopy show only one cooperative relaxation process. This latter molecular fluctuation is, for the first time, observed independently from other overlapping dielectric signals. Numerous electrostatic interactions among those dipolar endgroups are responsible for the strong cooperativity and heterogeneity of the canopy relaxation process. Our data analyses also revealed that the bulkiness of dipolar endgroups can disrupt the organization of the monolayer canopy thus increasing their ability to fluctuate as temperature is increased.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci