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

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News

  • [Apr. 2025] Two abstracts accepted to AAPM 2025.
  • [Mar. 2025] Two abstracts accepted to SNMMI 2025.
  • [May. 2024] Two abstracts accepted to EANM 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 DGM4MICCAI Workshop, In International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention, Oral presentation. [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 presentation (Top 4%). [paper] [arxiv] [code]

Mentorship

  • Ethan Wang (Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships), Computer Science, Rice University
  • Yining Zhang (Summer Undergraduate), Computer Science, Rice University

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
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