Synthetic Cardiac MRI Image Generation using Deep Generative Models

Synthetic cardiac MRI (CMRI) generation has emerged as a promising strategy to overcome the scarcity of annotated medical imaging data. Recent advances in GANs, VAEs, diffusion probabilistic models, and flow-matching techniques aim to generate anatomically accurate images while addressing challenges such as limited labeled datasets, vendor variability, and risks of privacy leakage through model memorization. Maskconditioned generation improves structural fidelity by guiding synthesis with segmentation maps, while diffusion and flowmatching models offer strong boundary preservation and efficient deterministic transformations. Cross-domain generalization is further supported through vendor-style conditioning and preprocessing steps like intensity normalization. To ensure privacy, studies increasingly incorporate membership inference attacks, nearest-neighbor analyses, and differential privacy mechanisms. Utility evaluations commonly measure downstream segmentation performance, with evidence showing that anatomically constrained synthetic data can enhance accuracy and robustness across multi-vendor settings. This review aims to compare existing CMRI generation approaches through the lenses of fidelity, utility, and privacy, highlighting current limitations and the need for integrated, evaluation-driven frameworks for reliable clinical workflows.

Balancing Fidelity, Utility, and Privacy in Synthetic Cardiac MRI Generation: A Comparative Study

Deep learning in cardiac MRI (CMR) is fundamentally constrained by both data scarcity and privacy regulations. This study systematically benchmarks three generative architectures: Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPM), Latent Diffusion Models (LDM), and Flow Matching (FM) for synthetic CMR generation. Utilizing a two-stage pipeline where anatomical masks condition image synthesis, we evaluate generated data across three critical axes: fidelity, utility, and privacy. Our results show that diffusion-based models, particularly DDPM, provide the most effective balance between downstream segmentation utility, image fidelity, and privacy preservation under limited-data conditions, while FM demonstrates promising privacy characteristics with slightly lower task-level performance. These findings quantify the trade-offs between cross-domain generalization and patient confidentiality, establishing a framework for safe and effective synthetic data augmentation in medical imaging.