Correcting Deviations from Normality: A Reformulated Diffusion Model for Multi-Class Unsupervised Anomaly Detection

Recent advances in diffusion models have spurred research into their application for Reconstruction-based unsupervised anomaly detection. However, these methods may struggle with maintaining structural integrity and recovering the anomaly-free content of abnormal regions, especially in multi-class scenarios. Furthermore, diffusion models are inherently designed to generate images from pure noise and struggle to selectively alter anomalous regions of an image while preserving normal ones. This leads to potential degradation of normal regions during reconstruction, hampering the effectiveness of anomaly detection. This paper introduces a reformulation of the standard diffusion model geared toward selective region alteration, allowing the accurate identification of anomalies. By modeling anomalies as noise in the latent space, our proposed Deviation correction diffusion (DeCo-Diff) model preserves the normal regions and encourages transformations exclusively on anomalous areas. This selective approach enhances the reconstruction quality, facilitating effective unsupervised detection and localization of anomaly regions. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate the superiority of our method in accurately identifying and localizing anomalies in complex images, with pixel-level AUPRC improvements of 11-14% over state-of-the-art models on well known anomaly detection datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/farzad-bz/DeCo-Diff

Harmonizing Flows: Leveraging normalizing flows for unsupervised and source-free MRI harmonization

Lack of standardization and various intrinsic parameters for magnetic resonance (MR) image acquisition results in heterogeneous images across different sites and devices, which adversely affects the generalization of deep neural networks. To alleviate this issue, this work proposes a novel unsupervised harmonization framework that leverages normalizing flows to align MR images, thereby emulating the distribution of a source domain. The proposed strategy comprises three key steps. Initially, a normalizing flow network is trained to capture the distribution characteristics of the source domain. Then, we train a shallow harmonizer network to reconstruct images from the source domain via their augmented counterparts. Finally, during inference, the harmonizer network is updated to ensure that the output images conform to the learned source domain distribution, as modeled by the normalizing flow network. Our approach, which is unsupervised, source-free, and task-agnostic is assessed in the context of both adults and neonatal cross-domain brain MRI segmentation, as well as neonatal brain age estimation, demonstrating its generalizability across tasks and population demographics. The results underscore its superior performance compared to existing methodologies. The code is available at https://github.com/farzad-bz/Harmonizing-Flows

Harmonizing Flows: Unsupervised MR harmonization based on normalizing flows

In this paper, we propose an unsupervised framework based on normalizing flows that harmonizes MR images to mimic the distribution of the source domain. The proposed framework consists of three steps. First, a shallow harmonizer network is trained to recover images of the source domain from their augmented versions. A normalizing flow network is then trained to learn the distribution of the source domain. Finally, at test time, a harmonizer network is modified so that the output images match the source domain's distribution learned by the normalizing flow model. Our unsupervised, source-free and task-independent approach is evaluated on cross-domain brain MRI segmentation using data from four different sites. Results demonstrate its superior performance compared to existing methods.