TR-GS: High-Fidelity Sparse-View CT Volumetric Rendering via t-Distribution Gaussian Splatting and Ray-Confidence Modeling

Abstract

High-fidelity 3D medical visualization supports applications such as clinical assessment and surgical planning. Sparse-view computed tomography (CT) can reduce projection requirements and associated radiation exposure, but limited observations may introduce structural artifacts and reconstruction uncertainty. Although 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) provides an efficient explicit representation for volumetric rendering, existing CT methods based on standard Gaussian primitives may be sensitive to unreliable observations under sparse-view acquisition. We present TR-GS, a Gaussian-splatting framework for sparse view CT volumetric rendering. TR-GS replaces standard Gaussian primitives with projectable Student's t-distribution primitives and introduces a ray-confidence model that regulates their degrees of freedom according to local ray observability. Confidence-guided 3D wavelet regularization is further used to balance high-frequency detail preservation and noise suppression. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show that TR-GS improves over representative baselines in most evaluated settings and remains competitive in the remaining cases. The resulting volumetric representations may support downstream medical multimedia applications, including XR-based visualization and interactive clinical rendering.