# ResViT: Residual vision transformers for multi-modal medical image synthesis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.16031 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.16031/

## Key facts

- Cited by 177 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 51 of its 119 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Jun 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1784/) (2014)
- [TransUNet: Transformers Make Strong Encoders for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04306/) (2021)
- [MLP-Mixer: An all-MLP Architecture for Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01601/) (2021)
- [Attention U-Net: Learning Where to Look for the Pancreas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03999/) (2018)
- [Sharpness-Aware Minimization for Efficiently Improving Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01412/) (2020)
- [A Survey on Deep Learning in Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05747/) (2017)
- [Self-Attention Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08318/) (2018)
- [Quantifying Attention Flow in Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00928/) (2020)
- [ImageNet-21K Pretraining for the Masses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10972/) (2021)
- [Identifying the Best Machine Learning Algorithms for Brain Tumor Segmentation, Progression Assessment, and Overall Survival Prediction in the BRATS Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.02629/) (2018)
- [Watch your Up-Convolution: CNN Based Generative Deep Neural Networks are Failing to Reproduce Spectral Distributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01826/) (2020)
- [Attention Gated Networks: Learning to Leverage Salient Regions in Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08114/) (2018)
- [Generative Adversarial Network in Medical Imaging: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.07294/) (2018)
- [GAN-based Synthetic Medical Image Augmentation for increased CNN Performance in Liver Lesion Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01229/) (2018)
- [CoTr: Efficiently Bridging CNN and Transformer for 3D Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03024/) (2021)
- [MedGAN: Medical Image Translation using GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.06397/) (2018)
- [Image Synthesis in Multi-Contrast MRI with Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01221/) (2018)
- [An Attention Free Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14103/) (2021)
- [Missing MRI Pulse Sequence Synthesis using Multi-Modal Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12200/) (2019)
- [Deep MR to CT Synthesis using Unpaired Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01155/) (2017)
- [Hi-Net: Hybrid-fusion Network for Multi-modal MR Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05000/) (2020)
- [TransMed: Transformers Advance Multi-modal Medical Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05940/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised MRI Reconstruction via Zero-Shot Learned Adversarial Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08059/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 177)

- [Transformers in Medical Imaging: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09873/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Medical Image Translation with Adversarial Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08208/) (2022)
- [Adaptive Diffusion Priors for Accelerated MRI Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05876/) (2022)
- [CoLa-Diff: Conditional Latent Diffusion Model for Multi-Modal MRI Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14081/) (2023)
- [Adaptive Latent Diffusion Model for 3D Medical Image to Image Translation: Multi-modal Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00265/) (2023)
- [Advances in Medical Image Analysis with Vision Transformers: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.03505/) (2023)
- [Swin Transformer for Fast MRI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03230/) (2022)
- [ReconFormer: Accelerated MRI Reconstruction Using Recurrent Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09376/) (2022)
- [Make-A-Volume: Leveraging Latent Diffusion Models for Cross-Modality 3D Brain MRI Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10094/) (2023)
- [Transformers in Medical Image Analysis: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12165/) (2022)
- [One Model to Synthesize Them All: Multi-contrast Multi-scale Transformer for Missing Data Imputation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13738/) (2022)
- [Unified Multi-Modal Image Synthesis for Missing Modality Imputation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05340/) (2023)
- [Equitable modelling of brain imaging by counterfactual augmentation with morphologically constrained 3D deep generative models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14923/) (2021)
- [Class-Aware Adversarial Transformers for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.10737/) (2022)
- [Federated Learning of Generative Image Priors for MRI Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04175/) (2022)
- [Self-Consistent Recursive Diffusion Bridge for Medical Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06789/) (2024)
- [I2I-Mamba: Multi-modal medical image synthesis via selective state space modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14022/) (2024)
- [Cross-conditioned Diffusion Model for Medical Image to Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08500/) (2024)
- [Medical Vision Language Pretraining: A survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06224/) (2023)
- [BolT: Fused Window Transformers for fMRI Time Series Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11578/) (2022)
- [One Model to Unite Them All: Personalized Federated Learning of Multi-Contrast MRI Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06509/) (2022)
- [Structure-Preserving Synthesis: MaskGAN for Unpaired MR-CT Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16143/) (2023)
- [Medical Image Segmentation on MRI Images with Missing Modalities: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06217/) (2022)
- [StegoGAN: Leveraging Steganography for Non-Bijective Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20142/) (2024)
- [Transformers in Healthcare: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00067/) (2023)
- [Data synthesis and adversarial networks: A review and meta-analysis in cancer imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.09543/) (2021)
- [Derm-T2IM: Harnessing Synthetic Skin Lesion Data via Stable Diffusion Models for Enhanced Skin Disease Classification using ViT and CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05159/) (2024)
- [FairDiff: Fair Segmentation with Point-Image Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06250/) (2024)
- [DreaMR: Diffusion-driven Counterfactual Explanation for Functional MRI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09547/) (2023)
- [Learning Fourier-Constrained Diffusion Bridges for MRI Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01096/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generative adversarial models with convolutional neural network (CNN) backbones have recently been established as state-of-the-art in numerous medical image synthesis tasks. However, CNNs are designed to perform local processing with compact filters, and this inductive bias compromises learning of contextual features. Here, we propose a novel generative adversarial approach for medical image synthesis, ResViT, that leverages the contextual sensitivity of vision transformers along with the precision of convolution operators and realism of adversarial learning.} ResViT's generator employs a central bottleneck comprising novel aggregated residual transformer (ART) blocks that synergistically combine residual convolutional and transformer modules. Residual connections in ART blocks promote diversity in captured representations, while a channel compression module distills task-relevant information. A weight sharing strategy is introduced among ART blocks to mitigate computational burden. A unified implementation is introduced to avoid the need to rebuild separate synthesis models for varying source-target modality configurations. Comprehensive demonstrations are performed for synthesizing missing sequences in multi-contrast MRI, and CT images from MRI. Our results indicate superiority of ResViT against competing CNN- and transformer-based methods in terms of qualitative observations and quantitative metrics.