MAP-Diff: Multi-Anchor Guided Diffusion for Progressive 3D Whole-Body Low-Dose PET Denoising

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02012v1
• Date: Mon, 02 Mar 2026 15:58:59 GMT
• Title: MAP-Diff: Multi-Anchor Guided Diffusion for Progressive 3D Whole-Body Low-Dose PET Denoising
• Authors: Peiyuan Jing, Chun-Wun Cheng, Liutao Yang, Zhenxuan Zhang, Thiago V. Lima, Klaus Strobel, Antoine Leimgruber, Angelica Aviles-Rivero, Guang Yang, Javier A. Montoya-Zegarra,
• Abstract summary: Low-dose Positron Emission Tomography (PET) reduces radiation exposure but suffers from severe noise and quantitative degradation.<n>We propose MAP-Diff, a multi-anchor guided diffusion framework for progressive 3D whole-body PET denoising.
• Score: 5.368395777354849
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Low-dose Positron Emission Tomography (PET) reduces radiation exposure but suffers from severe noise and quantitative degradation. Diffusion-based denoising models achieve strong final reconstructions, yet their reverse trajectories are typically unconstrained and not aligned with the progressive nature of PET dose formation. We propose MAP-Diff, a multi-anchor guided diffusion framework for progressive 3D whole-body PET denoising. MAP-Diff introduces clinically observed intermediate-dose scans as trajectory anchors and enforces timestep-dependent supervision to regularize the reverse process toward dose-aligned intermediate states. Anchor timesteps are calibrated via degradation matching between simulated diffusion corruption and real multi-dose PET pairs, and a timestep-weighted anchor loss stabilizes stage-wise learning. At inference, the model requires only ultra-low-dose input while enabling progressive, dose-consistent intermediate restoration. Experiments on internal (Siemens Biograph Vision Quadra) and cross-scanner (United Imaging uEXPLORER) datasets show consistent improvements over strong CNN-, Transformer-, GAN-, and diffusion-based baselines. On the internal dataset, MAP-Diff improves PSNR from 42.48 dB to 43.71 dB (+1.23 dB), increases SSIM to 0.986, and reduces NMAE from 0.115 to 0.103 (-0.012) compared to 3D DDPM. Performance gains generalize across scanners, achieving 34.42 dB PSNR and 0.141 NMAE on the external cohort, outperforming all competing methods.

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