SADiff: A Sinogram-Aware Diffusion Model for Low-Dose CT Image Denoising

CT image denoising is a crucial task in medical imaging systems, aimed at enhancing the quality of acquired visual signals. The emergence of diffusion models in machine learning has revolutionized the generation of high-quality CT images. However, diffusion-based CT image denoising methods suffer from two key shortcomings. First, they do not incorporate image formation priors from CT imaging, which limits their adaptability to the CT image denoising task. Second, they are trained on CT images with varying structures and textures at the signal phase, which hinders the model generalization capability. To address the first limitation, we propose a novel conditioning module for our diffusion model that leverages image formation priors from the sinogram domain to generate rich features. To tackle the second issue, we introduce a two-phase training mechanism in which the network gradually learns different anatomical textures and structures. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of both approaches in enhancing CT image quality, with improvements of up to 17% in PSNR and 38% in SSIM, highlighting their superiority over state-of-the-art methods.