Modeling the Neonatal Brain Development Using Implicit Neural Representations

The human brain undergoes rapid development during the third trimester of pregnancy. In this work, we model the neonatal development of the infant brain in this age range. As a basis, we use MR images of preterm- and term-birth neonates from the developing human connectome project (dHCP). We propose a neural network, specifically an implicit neural representation (INR), to predict 2D- and 3D images of varying time points. In order to model a subject-specific development process, it is necessary to disentangle the age from the subjects' identity in the latent space of the INR. We propose two methods, Subject Specific Latent Vectors (SSL) and Stochastic Global Latent Augmentation (SGLA), enabling this disentanglement. We perform an analysis of the results and compare our proposed model to an age-conditioned denoising diffusion model as a baseline. We also show that our method can be applied in a memory-efficient way, which is especially important for 3D data.

Denoising Diffusion Models for 3D Healthy Brain Tissue Inpainting

Monitoring diseases that affect the brain's structural integrity requires automated analysis of magnetic resonance (MR) images, e.g., for the evaluation of volumetric changes. However, many of the evaluation tools are optimized for analyzing healthy tissue. To enable the evaluation of scans containing pathological tissue, it is therefore required to restore healthy tissue in the pathological areas. In this work, we explore and extend denoising diffusion models for consistent inpainting of healthy 3D brain tissue. We modify state-of-the-art 2D, pseudo-3D, and 3D methods working in the image space, as well as 3D latent and 3D wavelet diffusion models, and train them to synthesize healthy brain tissue. Our evaluation shows that the pseudo-3D model performs best regarding the structural-similarity index, peak signal-to-noise ratio, and mean squared error. To emphasize the clinical relevance, we fine-tune this model on data containing synthetic MS lesions and evaluate it on a downstream brain tissue segmentation task, whereby it outperforms the established FMRIB Software Library (FSL) lesion-filling method.

Binary Noise for Binary Tasks: Masked Bernoulli Diffusion for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection

The high performance of denoising diffusion models for image generation has paved the way for their application in unsupervised medical anomaly detection. As diffusion-based methods require a lot of GPU memory and have long sampling times, we present a novel and fast unsupervised anomaly detection approach based on latent Bernoulli diffusion models. We first apply an autoencoder to compress the input images into a binary latent representation. Next, a diffusion model that follows a Bernoulli noise schedule is employed to this latent space and trained to restore binary latent representations from perturbed ones. The binary nature of this diffusion model allows us to identify entries in the latent space that have a high probability of flipping their binary code during the denoising process, which indicates out-of-distribution data. We propose a masking algorithm based on these probabilities, which improves the anomaly detection scores. We achieve state-of-the-art performance compared to other diffusion-based unsupervised anomaly detection algorithms while significantly reducing sampling time and memory consumption. The code is available at https://github.com/JuliaWolleb/Anomaly_berdiff.

WDM: 3D Wavelet Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Medical Image Synthesis

Due to the three-dimensional nature of CT- or MR-scans, generative modeling of medical images is a particularly challenging task. Existing approaches mostly apply patch-wise, slice-wise, or cascaded generation techniques to fit the high-dimensional data into the limited GPU memory. However, these approaches may introduce artifacts and potentially restrict the model's applicability for certain downstream tasks. This work presents WDM, a wavelet-based medical image synthesis framework that applies a diffusion model on wavelet decomposed images. The presented approach is a simple yet effective way of scaling diffusion models to high resolutions and can be trained on a single 40 GB GPU. Experimental results on BraTS and LIDC-IDRI unconditional image generation at a resolution of $128 \times 128 \times 128$ show state-of-the-art image fidelity (FID) and sample diversity (MS-SSIM) scores compared to GANs, Diffusion Models, and Latent Diffusion Models. Our proposed method is the only one capable of generating high-quality images at a resolution of $256 \times 256 \times 256$.

Diffusion Models for Memory-efficient Processing of 3D Medical Images

Denoising diffusion models have recently achieved state-of-the-art performance in many image-generation tasks. They do, however, require a large amount of computational resources. This limits their application to medical tasks, where we often deal with large 3D volumes, like high-resolution three-dimensional data. In this work, we present a number of different ways to reduce the resource consumption for 3D diffusion models and apply them to a dataset of 3D images. The main contribution of this paper is the memory-efficient patch-based diffusion model \textit{PatchDDM}, which can be applied to the total volume during inference while the training is performed only on patches. While the proposed diffusion model can be applied to any image generation tasks, we evaluate the method on the tumor segmentation task of the BraTS2020 dataset and demonstrate that we can generate meaningful three-dimensional segmentations.

Diffusion Models for Contrast Harmonization of Magnetic Resonance Images

Magnetic resonance (MR) images from multiple sources often show differences in image contrast related to acquisition settings or the used scanner type. For long-term studies, longitudinal comparability is essential but can be impaired by these contrast differences, leading to biased results when using automated evaluation tools. This study presents a diffusion model-based approach for contrast harmonization. We use a data set consisting of scans of 18 Multiple Sclerosis patients and 22 healthy controls. Each subject was scanned in two MR scanners of different magnetic field strengths (1.5 T and 3 T), resulting in a paired data set that shows scanner-inherent differences. We map images from the source contrast to the target contrast for both directions, from 3 T to 1.5 T and from 1.5 T to 3 T. As we only want to change the contrast, not the anatomical information, our method uses the original image to guide the image-to-image translation process by adding structural information. The aim is that the mapped scans display increased comparability with scans of the target contrast for downstream tasks. We evaluate this method for the task of segmentation of cerebrospinal fluid, grey matter and white matter. Our method achieves good and consistent results for both directions of the mapping.

Point Cloud Diffusion Models for Automatic Implant Generation

Advances in 3D printing of biocompatible materials make patient-specific implants increasingly popular. The design of these implants is, however, still a tedious and largely manual process. Existing approaches to automate implant generation are mainly based on 3D U-Net architectures on downsampled or patch-wise data, which can result in a loss of detail or contextual information. Following the recent success of Diffusion Probabilistic Models, we propose a novel approach for implant generation based on a combination of 3D point cloud diffusion models and voxelization networks. Due to the stochastic sampling process in our diffusion model, we can propose an ensemble of different implants per defect, from which the physicians can choose the most suitable one. We evaluate our method on the SkullBreak and SkullFix datasets, generating high-quality implants and achieving competitive evaluation scores.

Position Regression for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection

In recent years, anomaly detection has become an essential field in medical image analysis. Most current anomaly detection methods for medical images are based on image reconstruction. In this work, we propose a novel anomaly detection approach based on coordinate regression. Our method estimates the position of patches within a volume, and is trained only on data of healthy subjects. During inference, we can detect and localize anomalies by considering the error of the position estimate of a given patch. We apply our method to 3D CT volumes and evaluate it on patients with intracranial haemorrhages and cranial fractures. The results show that our method performs well in detecting these anomalies. Furthermore, we show that our method requires less memory than comparable approaches that involve image reconstruction. This is highly relevant for processing large 3D volumes, for instance, CT or MRI scans.

The Swiss Army Knife for Image-to-Image Translation: Multi-Task Diffusion Models

Recently, diffusion models were applied to a wide range of image analysis tasks. We build on a method for image-to-image translation using denoising diffusion implicit models and include a regression problem and a segmentation problem for guiding the image generation to the desired output. The main advantage of our approach is that the guidance during the denoising process is done by an external gradient. Consequently, the diffusion model does not need to be retrained for the different tasks on the same dataset. We apply our method to simulate the aging process on facial photos using a regression task, as well as on a brain magnetic resonance (MR) imaging dataset for the simulation of brain tumor growth. Furthermore, we use a segmentation model to inpaint tumors at the desired location in healthy slices of brain MR images. We achieve convincing results for all problems.

Diffusion Models for Medical Anomaly Detection

In medical applications, weakly supervised anomaly detection methods are of great interest, as only image-level annotations are required for training. Current anomaly detection methods mainly rely on generative adversarial networks or autoencoder models. Those models are often complicated to train or have difficulties to preserve fine details in the image. We present a novel weakly supervised anomaly detection method based on denoising diffusion implicit models. We combine the deterministic iterative noising and denoising scheme with classifier guidance for image-to-image translation between diseased and healthy subjects. Our method generates very detailed anomaly maps without the need for a complex training procedure. We evaluate our method on the BRATS2020 dataset for brain tumor detection and the CheXpert dataset for detecting pleural effusions.