# Distilling Photon-Counting CT into Routine Chest CT through Clinically Validated Degradation Modeling Source: [Distilling Photon-Counting CT into Routine Chest CT through Clinically Validated Degradation Modeling]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2026-04-10T05:00:13.311Z Authors: Junqi Liu, Xinze Zhou, Wenxuan Li, Scott Ye, Arkadiusz Sitek, Xiaofeng Yang, Yucheng Tang, Daguang Xu, Kai Ding, Kang Wang, Yang Yang, Alan L. Yuille, Zongwei Zhou Published: 2026-04-08T17:47:35.000Z ## Abstract Photon-counting CT (PCCT) provides superior image quality with higher spatial resolution and lower noise compared to conventional energy-integrating CT (EICT), but its limited clinical availability restricts large-scale research and clinical deployment. To bridge this gap, we propose SUMI, a simulated degradation-to-enhancement method that learns to reverse realistic acquisition artifacts in low-quality EICT by leveraging high-quality PCCT as reference. Our central insight is to explicitly model realistic acquisition degradations, transforming PCCT into clinically plausible lower-quality counterparts and learning to invert this process. The simulated degradations were validated for clinical realism by board-certified radiologists, enabling faithful supervision without requiring paired acquisitions at scale. As outcomes of this technical contribution, we: (1) train a latent diffusion model on 1,046 PCCTs, using an autoencoder first pre-trained on both these PCCTs and 405,379 EICTs from 145 hospitals to extract general CT latent features that we release for reuse in other generative medical imaging tasks; (2) construct a large-scale dataset of over 17,316 publicly available EICTs enhanced to PCCT-like quality, with radiologist-validated voxel-wise annotations of airway trees, arteries, veins, lungs, and lobes; and (3) demonstrate substantial improvements: across external data, SUMI outperforms state-of-the-art image translation methods by 15% in SSIM and 20% in PSNR, improves radiologist-rated clinical utility in reader studies, and enhances downstream top-ranking lesion detection performance, increasing sensitivity by up to 15% and F1 score by up to 10%. Our results suggest that emerging imaging advances can be systematically distilled into routine EICT using limited high-quality scans as reference. ## Recorded benchmark results A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage. - [Medical Image Enhancement on 446 Patients (external)](): Medical Image Enhancement; 446 Patients (external); SSIM: 92.8. ## Original sources and implementation [Original paper]() [PDF]()