mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Diffusion Models for Contrast Harmonization of Magnetic Resonance Images

arXiv 2303.08189 ↗First posted 14 Mar 2023eess.IV cs.CVcited by 19

On the map: Diffusion models → Medical imaging and segmentation

Abstract (arXiv)

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.

Key facts. Cited by 19 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Medical imaging and segmentation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models. Builds on 24 of its 50 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 14 Mar 2023.

Builds on

24 of 50 references.

Closest ancestors · 6

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2022Brain Imaging Generation with Latent Diffusion Models15 Sep
  2. 2022Unsupervised Medical Image Translation with Adversarial Diffusion Models17 Jul
  3. 2022The Swiss Army Knife for Image-to-Image Translation: Multi-Task Diffusion Models6 Apr
  4. 2022Diffusion Models for Medical Anomaly Detection8 Mar
  5. 2021DiffuseMorph: Unsupervised Deformable Image Registration Using Diffusion Model9 Dec
  6. 2021Diffusion Models for Implicit Image Segmentation Ensembles6 Dec

Other references · 18

  1. 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 20,851
  2. 2015U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentationcited by 19,604
  3. 2021High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Modelscited by 18,694
  4. 2020Denoising Diffusion Implicit Modelscited by 9,655
  5. 2021Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesiscited by 8,185
  6. 2015Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamicscited by 7,005
  7. 2022Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understandingcited by 6,322
  8. 2016Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networkscited by 4,510
  9. 2021Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 3,736
  10. 2022RePaint: Inpainting using Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 1,419
  11. 2021Palette: Image-to-Image Diffusion Modelscited by 1,296
  12. 2021Alias-Free Generative Adversarial Networkscited by 1,181
6 more
  1. 2019Automated brain extraction of multi-sequence MRI using artificial neural networkscited by 133
  2. 2018Image Synthesis in Multi-Contrast MRI with Conditional Generative Adversarial Networkscited by 131
  3. 2016Medical Image Synthesis with Context-Aware Generative Adversarial Networkscited by 91
  4. 2022Conversion Between CT and MRI Images Using Diffusion and Score-Matching Modelscited by 69
  5. 2019SPA-GAN: Spatial Attention GAN for Image-to-Image Translationcited by 43
  6. 2022MIDMs: Matching Interleaved Diffusion Models for Exemplar-based Image Translationcited by 22

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2023: 1; 2024: 12; 2025: 3; 2026: 3.

19 papers.

Sort:

By area:

  1. 2024WDM: 3D Wavelet Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Medical Image Synthesiscited by 56
  2. 2024Denoising Diffusion Models for 3D Healthy Brain Tissue Inpaintingcited by 22
  3. 2024Fr'echet Radiomic Distance (FRD): A Versatile Metric for Comparing Medical Imaging Datasetscited by 19
  4. 2024cWDM: Conditional Wavelet Diffusion Models for Cross-Modality 3D Medical Image Synthesiscited by 18
  5. 2024Deep Generative Models for 3D Medical Image Synthesiscited by 14
  6. 2024Denoising Diffusion Models for Inpainting of Healthy Brain Tissuecited by 13
  7. 2023A Survey of Emerging Applications of Diffusion Probabilistic Models in MRIcited by 9
  8. 2024Simulating Dynamic Tumor Contrast Enhancement in Breast MRI using Conditional Generative Adversarial Networkscited by 6
  9. 2026FlowLet: Conditional 3D Brain MRI Synthesis using Wavelet Flow Matchingcited by 5
  10. 2024Harmonizing Flows: Leveraging normalizing flows for unsupervised and source-free MRI harmonizationcited by 4
  11. 2024RadGazeGen: Radiomics and Gaze-guided Medical Image Generation using Diffusion Modelscited by 4
  12. 2024Denoising Diffusion Models for Anomaly Localization in Medical Imagescited by 3
7 more
  1. 2024QID2: An Image-Conditioned Diffusion Model for Q-space Up-sampling of DWI Datacited by 1
  2. 2024SynthBrainGrow: Synthetic Diffusion Brain Aging for Longitudinal MRI Data Generation in Young Peoplecited by 0
  3. 2025HepatoGEN: Generating Hepatobiliary Phase MRI with Perceptual and Adversarial Modelscited by 0
  4. 2025Towards Diagnostic Quality Flat-Panel Detector CT Imaging Using Diffusion Modelscited by 0
  5. 2025Deep Generative Models for Enhanced Vitreous OCT Imagingcited by 0
  6. 2026Unified Multi-Site Multi-Sequence Brain MRI Harmonization Enriched by Biomedical Semantic Stylecited by 0
  7. 2026CoMNet: A MedNeXt-CorrDiff Framework for Multi-Site Brain Tumor Segmentationcited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2024Unpaired Volumetric Harmonization of Brain MRI with Conditional Latent Diffusion
  2. 2026Multiscale Structure-Guided Latent Diffusion for Multimodal MRI Translation
  3. 2024Bi-Directional MS Lesion Filling and Synthesis Using Denoising Diffusion Implicit Model-based Lesion Repainting
  4. 2023Adaptive Latent Diffusion Model for 3D Medical Image to Image Translation: Multi-modal Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study
  5. 2025Efficient and robust 3D blind harmonization for large domain gaps
  6. 2025Diffusion-Driven Generation of Minimally Preprocessed Brain MRI
  7. 2026Conditional Flow Matching for Cross-Field MRI Harmonisation
  8. 2025Lesion-Aware Post-Training of Latent Diffusion Models for Synthesizing Diffusion MRI from CT Perfusion