SBSDM: A Style-aware Bidirectional Stream Diffusion Model for CT-to-PET Synthesis

Abstract

CT-to-PET synthesis aims to synthesize PET images from the widely available and lower-cost CT scans to address the high cost and additional radiation exposure associated with PET scanning.

However, CT-to-PET synthesis faces two key challenges due to the sequential correlation of volumetric imaging: preserving smooth transition between adjacent slices and ensuring style consistency across long-range slices.

To overcome these limitations, we propose the Style-aware Bidirectional Stream Diffusion Model, which ensures both inter-slice continuity and global style consistency with low computational cost.

Specifically, we first utilize a Vector Quantized Variational Autoencoder to encode bidirectional adjacent CT slices into latent codes. A Neighbor Attention module is then introduced to capture transition patterns among these latent codes, ensuring structural continuity. To enhance style consistency, we further design a Prototype Prompting mechanism to construct a feature pool from long-range slices. Global style prototypes are extracted from the feature pool and dynamically integrated into the generation process, guiding the model’s attention toward consistent stylistic features across slices. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.