mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Memory-Efficient 3D Denoising Diffusion Models for Medical Image Processing

arXiv 2303.15288 ↗First posted 27 Mar 2023cs.CV cs.LGcited by 30

On the map: Diffusion models → Medical imaging and segmentation

Abstract (arXiv)

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 textitPatchDDM, 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.

Key facts. Cited by 30 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Medical imaging and segmentation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models. Builds on 20 of its 27 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 27 Mar 2023.

Builds on

20 of 27 references.

Closest ancestors · 6

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2022Medical Diffusion: Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models for 3D Medical Image Generation7 Nov
  2. 2022MedSegDiff: Medical Image Segmentation with Diffusion Probabilistic Model1 Nov
  3. 2022Accelerating Diffusion Models via Pre-segmentation Diffusion Sampling for Medical Image Segmentation27 Oct
  4. 2022Diffusion Models for Medical Anomaly Detection8 Mar
  5. 2021Diffusion Models for Implicit Image Segmentation Ensembles6 Dec
  6. 2021SegDiff: Image Segmentation with Diffusion Probabilistic Models1 Dec

Other references · 14

  1. 2015Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognitioncited by 51,809
  2. 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 20,851
  3. 2015U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentationcited by 19,604
  4. 2020Denoising Diffusion Implicit Modelscited by 9,655
  5. 2022Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understandingcited by 6,322
  6. 2021Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generationcited by 4,276
  7. 2021Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 3,736
  8. 2021GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Modelscited by 3,595
  9. 2022Elucidating the Design Space of Diffusion-Based Generative Modelscited by 2,994
  10. 2021Palette: Image-to-Image Diffusion Modelscited by 1,296
  11. 2021DiffusionCLIP: Text-Guided Diffusion Models for Robust Image Manipulationcited by 640
  12. 2018Identifying the Best Machine Learning Algorithms for Brain Tumor Segmentation, Progression Assessment, and Overall Survival Prediction in the BRATS Challengecited by 508
2 more
  1. 2018An Intriguing Failing of Convolutional Neural Networks and the CoordConv Solutioncited by 302
  2. 2022Cold Diffusion: Inverting Arbitrary Image Transforms Without Noisecited by 275

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2023: 3; 2024: 12; 2025: 9; 2026: 6.

30 papers.

Sort:

By area:

  1. 2024WDM: 3D Wavelet Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Medical Image Synthesiscited by 56
  2. 2025Efficient Diffusion Models: A Surveycited by 35
  3. 2023DiffBoost: Enhancing Medical Image Segmentation via Text-Guided Diffusion Modelcited by 23
  4. 2024Denoising Diffusion Models for 3D Healthy Brain Tissue Inpaintingcited by 22
  5. 2024Denoising Diffusion Models for Inpainting of Healthy Brain Tissuecited by 13
  6. 20242.5D Multi-view Averaging Diffusion Model for 3D Medical Image Translation: Application to Low-count PET Reconstruction with CT-less Attenuation Correctioncited by 13
  7. 2023A Survey of Emerging Applications of Diffusion Probabilistic Models in MRIcited by 9
  8. 2024Pi-fusion: Physics-informed diffusion model for learning fluid dynamicscited by 9
  9. 2024SimuScope: Realistic Endoscopic Synthetic Dataset Generation through Surgical Simulation and Diffusion Modelscited by 8
  10. 2023A Recycling Training Strategy for Medical Image Segmentation with Diffusion Denoising Modelscited by 5
  11. 2024Brain Tumour Removing and Missing Modality Generation using 3D WDMcited by 4
  12. 2025LAND: Lung and Nodule Diffusion for 3D Chest CT Synthesis with Anatomical Guidancecited by 4
18 more
  1. 2024Denoising Diffusion Models for Anomaly Localization in Medical Imagescited by 3
  2. 2025TextDiffSeg: Text-guided Latent Diffusion Model for 3d Medical Images Segmentationcited by 2
  3. 2024QID2: An Image-Conditioned Diffusion Model for Q-space Up-sampling of DWI Datacited by 1
  4. 2024Continuous and complete liver vessel segmentation with graph-attention guided diffusioncited by 1
  5. 2025Probabilistic Forecasting for Dynamical Systems with Missing or Imperfect Datacited by 1
  6. 2025RealDeal: Enhancing Realism and Details in Brain Image Generation via Image-to-Image Diffusion Modelscited by 1
  7. 2026MotionDPS: Motion-Compensated 3D Brain MRI Reconstructioncited by 1
  8. 2024IgCONDA-PET: Weakly-Supervised PET Anomaly Detection using Implicitly-Guided Attention-Conditional Counterfactual Diffusion Modeling -- a Multi-Center, Multi-Cancer, and Multi-Tracer Studycited by 0
  9. 2024Evaluating Utility of Memory Efficient Medical Image Generation: A Study on Lung Nodule Segmentationcited by 0
  10. 2025Exploring Robustness of Cortical Morphometry in the presence of white matter lesions, using Diffusion Models for Lesion Fillingcited by 0
  11. 2025Efficient and robust 3D blind harmonization for large domain gapscited by 0
  12. 2025An Efficient 3D Latent Diffusion Model for T1-contrast Enhanced MRI Generationcited by 0
  13. 2025AI-Driven Radiology Report Generation for Traumatic Brain Injuriescited by 0
  14. 2026Kidney Cancer Detection Using 3D-Based Latent Diffusion Modelscited by 0
  15. 2026Structure-Adaptive Sparse Diffusion in Voxel Space for 3D Medical Image Enhancementcited by 0
  16. 2026LiFT: Lifted Inter-slice Feature Trajectories for 3D Image Generation from 2D Generatorscited by 0
  17. 2026Spatio-Temporal Mixture-of-Modality-Experts Diffusion for Quantitative DCE-MRI Synthesis from Incomplete MR Sequencescited by 0
  18. 2026Renormalization Group Flow Matching for Scalable Local Generative Modelingcited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 20243D MedDiffusion: A 3D Medical Latent Diffusion Model for Controllable and High-quality Medical Image Generation
  2. 2025Local Patches Meet Global Context: Scalable 3D Diffusion Priors for Computed Tomography Reconstruction
  3. 2025Computationally Efficient Diffusion Models in Medical Imaging: A Comprehensive Review
  4. 2022Diffusion Models for Medical Image Analysis: A Comprehensive Survey
  5. 2024DiffusionBlend: Learning 3D Image Prior through Position-aware Diffusion Score Blending for 3D Computed Tomography Reconstruction
  6. 2023Patched Denoising Diffusion Models For High-Resolution Image Synthesis
  7. 2026Efficient and Training-Free Single-Image Diffusion Models
  8. 2024Fast-DDPM: Fast Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models for Medical Image-to-Image Generation