Robustness and Stability Analysis of Differentiable Shift-Variant FBP for Cone-Beam CT under Challenging Acquisition Settings

Chengze Ye, Linda-Sophie Schneider, Yipeng Sun, Mareike Thies, Siyuan Mei, Paula Andrea Pérez-Toro, Siming Bayer, Andreas Maier

The differentiable shift-variant filtered backprojection (SV-FBP) framework enables data-driven estimation of redundancy weights for cone-beam CT reconstruction under general source trajectories, removing the need for analytically derived weighting schemes. In this work, we present a systematic study of the robustness and adaptability of differentiable SV-FBP under challenging acquisition settings. We show that the framework remains stable across highly irregular and discontinuous trajectories, indicating that reconstruction performance is largely insensitive to trajectory ordering or continuity. Instead, the spatial distribution of sampling points plays a more dominant role. Under sparse-view conditions, differentiable SV-FBP achieves competitive reconstruction quality while providing an order-of-magnitude reduction in computation time compared to iterative reconstruction methods at moderate sampling densities. However, we identify a clear transition regime under severe undersampling, where the absence of iterative data consistency leads to performance degradation. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the framework remains applicable to non-planar multi-isocenter geometries, such as Lissajous-saddle trajectories, without requiring architectural modifications. These findings provide new insights into the behavior and limitations of the differentiable SV-FBP model and highlight it as a flexible and efficient solution for non-standard and robotic CBCT acquisition scenarios.