Yiran Sun (she/her/hers)

I am a (happy!) 4th-year Ph.D. candidate 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 also a member of the Digital Health Initative. I am fortunate to work with Dr. Osama R. Mawlawi.

My research topic can be generally considered as Continuous-Time Generative Modeling for Medical Image Reconstruction. Some of my projects are also related to implicit neural representations (INRs) learning.

Specifically in following directions:

Image Reconstruction: PET/CT reconstruction from sinogram data or planar 2D projections
Probabilistic Imaging: Modeling and analysis based on probabilistic frameworks
Uncertainty Quantification: Distribution-free and distribution-based methods for quantifying uncertainty

I have an MS in Data Analytics and Statistics from WashU, where I was also 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.

GitHub / Google Scholar / X

News

[Jul. 2025] I will give a technical talk on LegoPET at AI in Health Conference 2025 in September.

[Apr. 2025] Two abstracts accepted to AAPM 2025.

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

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

Research

I primarily focus on Computed Tomography (CT) and Positron Emission Tomography (PET) imaging modalities. Some of my representative work are listed below. For the most up-to-date and complete list of my publications, please refer to my Google Scholar profile.

[11]	Yiran Sun, Osama Mawlawi Posterior-Mean Denoising Diffusion Model for Realistic PET Image Reconstruction Preprint 2025, arXiv:2503.08546. [arXiv] [website] [code]
[10]	Yiran Sun, Osama Mawlawi Posterior-Mean Diffusion Model for Realistic PET Image Reconstruction AAPM 2025, In AAPM 67th Annual Meeting & Exhibition, Oral.
[9]	Yiran Sun, Guha Balakrishnan, Ashok Veeraraghavan, Osama Mawlawi DIFR3CT: Latent Diffusion for Probabilistic 3D CT Reconstruction from Biplanar X-Rays Old Preprint 2024 (Update Soon), arXiv:2408.15118. [old arXiv] [website] [code]
[8]	Yiran Sun, Osama Mawlawi PET Image Denoising with Rectified Flow SNMMI 2025, In Journal of Nuclear Medicine 66 (supplement 2).
[7]	Yiran Sun, Osama Mawlawi Epistemic and Aleatoric Uncertainty Estimation in PET Image Denoising SNMMI 2025, In Journal of Nuclear Medicine 66 (supplement 2).
[6]	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. [paper] [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.
[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.
[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.
[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 Workshop on Deep Generative Models, In International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention, Oral. [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 Oral (Top 4%). [paper] [arXiv] [code]

Mentorship

I am fortunate to work with the following talented and motivated students:

Katherine Hall (Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship), Computer Science, Rice University
Ethan Wang (Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship), Computer Science, Rice University
Yining Zhang (Summer Undergraduate), Computer Science, Rice University

Awards, Fellowships, and Grants

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

Get in Touch

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 use the contact form below to schedule a meeting if you would like to chat with me on any topics. I'll get back to you as soon as possible.

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