ProSAC-CT: Progressive Spectral-Anatomical Co-Guided Multi-Stage Diffusion Model for Low-Dose CT Denoising

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2607.01756v1
• Date: Thu, 02 Jul 2026 06:13:43 GMT
• Title: ProSAC-CT: Progressive Spectral-Anatomical Co-Guided Multi-Stage Diffusion Model for Low-Dose CT Denoising
• Abstract summary: We propose ProSAC-CT, a spectral-anatomical co-guided diffusion model for image-domain LDCT denoising.<n>ProSAC-CT integrates an anatomical-prior-guided conditioning module, a residual frequency-domain decoupling stage, and a time-step-decoupling denoising decoder.<n> Experiments show that ProSAC-CT improves image fidelity, structural similarity, perceptual quality, and information preservation over representative methods.
• Score: 4.802209002705593
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) reduces radiation exposure but introduces stronger quantum noise, streak artifacts, and local texture degradation, which can obscure anatomical boundaries and weaken low-contrast structures. Diffusion models are promising for LDCT denoising by progressively recovering normal-dose CT (NDCT) images from degraded LDCT inputs, but existing methods often suffer from insufficient anatomical guidance, uncertain frequency-dependent recovery, and uniform reverse-process modeling. We propose ProSAC-CT, a progressive spectral-anatomical co-guided multi-stage diffusion model for image-domain LDCT denoising. ProSAC-CT integrates an anatomical-prior-guided conditioning (APGC) module, a residual frequency-domain decoupling stage (RFDDS), and a time-step-decoupling denoising decoder (TD3). APGC extracts LDCT-derived structural guidance, RFDDS enhances frequency-aware representations, and TD3 assigns them to different reverse-diffusion stages for anatomical stabilization, boundary refinement, and fine-detail recovery. Experiments on four LDCT degradation benchmarks show that ProSAC-CT improves image fidelity, structural similarity, perceptual quality, and information preservation over representative methods while better preserving boundary-sensitive anatomical details. Downstream anatomical-region classification on Mayo-2020 further indicates that ProSAC-CT retains task-relevant anatomical information, supporting its practical use for low-dose CT denoising.

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