2022/11/07 by Firas Khader, Gustav Mueller-Franzes, Khader, Firas +27 · 5 citations
Computer Science · Medicine · #AI in cancer detection #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Generative Adversarial Networks and Image Synthesis #Image and Video Processing (eess.IV) #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Radiomics and Machine Learning in Medical Imaging #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2211.03364
openalex publication_date 2022/11/07 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Recent advances in computer vision have shown promising results in image generation. Diffusion probabilistic models in particular have generated realistic images from textual input, as demonstrated by DALL-E 2, Imagen and Stable Diffusion. However, their use in medicine, where image data typically comprises three-dimensional volumes, has not been systematically evaluated. Synthetic images may play a crucial role in privacy preserving artificial intelligence and can also be used to augment small datasets. Here we show that diffusion probabilistic models can synthesize high quality medical imaging data, which we show for Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI) and Computed Tomography (CT) images. We provide quantitative measurements of their performance through a reader study with two medical experts who rated the quality of the synthesized images in three categories: Realistic image appearance, anatomical correctness and consistency between slices. Furthermore, we demonstrate that synthetic images can be used in a self-supervised pre-training and improve the performance of breast segmentation models when data is scarce (dice score 0.91 vs. 0.95 without vs. with synthetic data). The code is publicly available on GitHub: https://github.com/FirasGit/medicaldiffusion.