Yiran Sun

I am a (happy!) fourth-year Ph.D. student at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice Unversity, as well as the Department of Imaging Physics at MD Anderson Cancer Center, where I work on using and designing GenAI in medical imaging analysis. I am fortunate to be advised by Dr. Osama R. Mawlawi.

My research can be broadly categorized into the following directions:

Image Reconstruction: 3D PET/CT reconstruction from raw sinogram data OR from extreme few-view 2D projections
Uncertainty Quantification: prediction with confidence
Image Restoration: partial volume effect/motion correction, denoising

I have an MS in Data Analytics and Statistics from WashU, where I was a research assistant for Dr. Ulugbek Kamilov and Dr. Yu Sun in Computational Imaging Group. I have a BS in Mathematics and Applied Mathematics and a BS in Economics from CCNU.

Inspired by Dr. Jia-Bin Huang, I set aside some time every week to meet with people (preferrably students from underrepresented groups). Feel free to send me an email to schedule a meeting if you would like to chat with me on any topics.

Email / GitHub / Google Scholar / LinkedIn

News

[Mar. 2025] Two abstracts accepted to SNMMI 2025.

[Jan. 2025] One paper LegoPET has been accepted to ISBI 2025. Cheers!

[May. 2024] Two abstracts accepted to EANM 2024.

[Apr. 2024] Three abstracts accepted to AAPM 2024.

Research

I'm interested in developing generative models (especially diffusion models, flow matching) with applications in 2D/3D tomographic reconstruction. I mostly focus on Computed Tomography (CT), Positron Emission Tomography (PET). Some of my representative work are listed below. Please always refer latest and full list in my google scholar profile.

[7]	Yiran Sun, Osama Mawlawi LegoPET: Hierarchical Feature Guided Conditional Diffusion for PET Image Reconstruction ISBI 2025, In IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI), Oral presentation. [arxiv] [website] [code]
[6]	Yiran Sun, Hana Baroudi, Tucker Netherton, Laurence Court, Osama Mawlawi, Ashok Veeraraghavan, Guha Balakrishnan DIFR3CT: Latent Diffusion for Probabilistic 3D CT Reconstruction from Few Planar X-Rays Preprint 2024, arXiv:2408.15118. [arxiv] [website] [code]
[5]	Yiran Sun, Osama Mawlawi Towards Uncertainty Estimation in PET Partial Volume Correction with a Diffusion Probabilistic Model EANM 2024, In European Journal of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging 51 (Suppl 1), Top Rated Oral presentation.
[4]	Yiran Sun, Osama Mawlawi Partial Volume Correction in Brain PET Imaging Using Swin Transformer AAPM 2024, In AAPM 66th Annual Meeting & Exhibition, Blue Ribbon Poster presentation.
[3]	Yiran Sun, Osama Mawlawi R2U-DDPM: A Conditional Diffusion Model with R2U-Net Guidance for Realistic PET Image Synthesis SNMMI 2024, In Journal of Nuclear Medicine 65 (supplement 2), Oral presentation.
[2]	Yiran Sun, Tucker Netherton, Laurence Court, Ashok Veeraraghavan, Guha Balakrishnan CT Reconstruction from Few Planar X-Rays with Application Towards Low-Resource Radiotherapy MICCAI 2023 DGM Workshop, In International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) Workshop on Deep Generative Models. [paper] [arxiv] [website] [code]
[1]	Yu Sun, Jiaming Liu, Yiran Sun, Brendt Wohlberg, Ulugbek S Kamilov Async-RED: A Provably Convergent Asynchronous Block Parallel Stochastic Method Using Deep Denoising Priors ICLR 2021, In International Conference on Learning Representations, Spotlight presentation (Top 4%). [paper] [arxiv] [code]

Awards

Rice Engineering Alumni (REA) Graduate Student Travel Grant
IEEE International Conference on Computational Photography (ICCP) Student Travel Grants
Rice University John Clark Jr. Fellowship Award
Outstanding Undergraduate
Outstanding Undergraduate in Science and Innovation
National Level (China) Undergraduate Innovation and Entrepreneurship Grant
“Internet+" Undergraduate Innovation and Entrepreneurship Grant

Design and source code from Jon Barron, Leonid Keselman and Jiaming Song's websites.