PWD: Prior-aware Wavelet Diffusion for Efficient Dental Limited-angle CT Reconstruction

Generative diffusion models have received increasing attention in medical imaging, particularly in limited-angle computed tomography (LACT). Standard diffusion models achieve high-quality image reconstruction but require a large number of sampling steps during inference, imposing a heavy computational burden. Although skip-sampling strategies have been proposed to improve efficiency, they often lead to loss of fine structural details. To address this issue, we propose a Prior-aware Wavelet Diffusion for Efficient Dental Limited-angle CT Reconstruction (PWD). The PWD enables efficient sampling while preserving reconstruction fidelity in LACT, and effectively mitigates the degradation typically introduced by skip-sampling. Specifically, during the training phase, PWD maps the distribution of LACT images to that of fully sampled target images, enabling the model to learn structural correspondences between them. During inference, the LACT image serves as an prior-aware to guide the sampling trajectory, allowing for high-quality reconstruction with significantly fewer steps. In addition, PWD performs multi-scale feature fusion in the wavelet domain, effectively enhancing the reconstruction of fine details by leveraging both low-frequency and high-frequency information. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations on clinical dental arch CBCT and periapical datasets demonstrate that PWD outperforms existing methods under the same sampling condition. Using only 50 sampling steps, PWD achieves at least 1.7 dB improvement in PSNR and 10% gain in SSIM.