Physics-Aware Accelerated Unrolling Model for Sparse-View CT Reconstruction

Abstract

Deep unrolling models (DUMs) have shown great poten-tial in sparse-view CT reconstruction by combining itera-tive optimization and deep learning. However, most DUMsinsufficiently account for physical degradation from sparse-view imaging, leading to slow convergence and persistentartifacts. To address this, we propose PAUM, a Physics-Aware Accelerated Unrolling Model explicitly incorporatingCT imaging physics into the iterative reconstruction. PAUMfirst introduces a Dual-Domain Physics-Aware Extrapolation(DDPE) module. By modeling dual-domain degradations, itperforms row-wise extrapolation in the sinogram domain toimprove missing view recovery, and pixel-wise extrapolationin the image domain to address spatially variant degradationfrom incomplete backprojection. This physics-aware extrap-olation aligns optimization dynamics with underlying physi-cal imaging degradation, significantly enhances structural up-dates, thereby accelerating convergence. Subsequently, wedevelop a lightweight Block-Attention Deformable Regu-larization Network (BDRN), leveraging deformable convo-lutions and block-wise attention to model spatially variantand structured artifact physical characteristics. This enablesspatially adaptive regularization on extrapolated results, ef-fectively improving reconstruction quality. Extensive exper-iments demonstrate PAUM achieves over 1dB improvementcompared to SOTA methods, while reducing iteration countby 50%.