Mitigating Data Consistency Induced Discrepancy in Cascaded Diffusion Models for Sparse-View CT Reconstruction

Sparse-view Computed Tomography (CT) image reconstruction is a promising approach to reduce radiation exposure, but it inevitably leads to image degradation. Although diffusion model-based approaches are computationally expensive and suffer from the training-sampling discrepancy, they provide a potential solution to the problem. This study introduces a novel Cascaded Diffusion with Discrepancy Mitigation (CDDM) framework, including the low-quality image generation in latent space and the high-quality image generation in pixel space which contains data consistency and discrepancy mitigation in a one-step reconstruction process. The cascaded framework minimizes computational costs by replacing some inference steps from pixel to latent space. The discrepancy mitigation technique addresses the training-sampling gap induced by data consistency, ensuring the data distribution is close to the original diffusion manifold. A specialized Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) is employed to process image gradients in separate directions, offering a more targeted approach to regularization. Experimental results across several datasets demonstrate CDDM's superior performance in high-quality image generation with clearer boundaries compared to existing methods, highlighting the framework's computational efficiency.