Dual-Energy CT (DECT) serves an important role in quantitative imaging applications due to its capability for material differentiation. Nevertheless, material decomposition is highly sensitive to noise due to the large condition number of the linear system. To address this, iterative decomposition methods employ regularization terms to enforce noise suppression on the decomposed images. However, these conventional techniques rely on handcrafted image priors and have limited capabilities to characterize the material image distribution. In recent years, deep learning-based methods have been proposed for better distribution learning performance and high computation efficiency. Diffusion models are emerging generative approaches that show great performance in medical image synthesis and translation. In this work, we propose an image-domain material decomposition method for DECT using the conditional Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM). The preliminary results show its superiority and potential in quantitative imaging tasks of DECT.
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