Structurally Informed 3-D Gaussian Splatting for Limited-Angle CBCT

Limited-angle cone-beam computed tomography (LA-CBCT) enables rapid imaging and reduced radiation exposure, but its severely incomplete projection data lead to ill-posed reconstructions with prominent artifacts, limiting clinical applicability. Recent advances in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS) have shown promise for efficient tomographic reconstruction, yet its performance remains highly sensitive to initialization. In this work, we present SPARK (Structurally-Informed Projection-Accelerated Reconstruction), a two-stage framework that introduces a generative, structurally informed initialization for 3D-GS. In the first stage, a geometry-conditioned network directly predicts complete 3D Gaussian parameters from a sparse subset of projections, embedding learned anatomical priors to mitigate artifact propagation. In the second stage, the generated scene is refined through physics-based 3D-GS optimization, yielding high-fidelity reconstructions consistent with measured projections. Extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate that SPARK substantially improves both image quality and convergence speed, achieving superior PSNR/SSIM in severely limited-angle scenarios compared with analytical, iterative, and deep learning baselines. Moreover, SPARK reconstructions provide enhanced inputs for downstream post-processing networks, further boosting image fidelity. These results suggest that SPARK is a promising prior-informed 3D-GS framework for simulated LA-CBCT reconstruction under limited angular coverage, providing an effective bridge between data-driven anatomical priors and physics-based projection-domain refinement.