mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Conditional Diffusion Models for Semantic 3D Brain MRI Synthesis

arXiv 2305.18453 ↗First posted 29 May 2023eess.IV cs.CV cs.LGcited by 86

On the map: Diffusion models → Medical imaging and segmentation

Abstract (arXiv)

Artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare, especially in medical imaging, faces challenges due to data scarcity and privacy concerns. Addressing these, we introduce Med-DDPM, a diffusion model designed for 3D semantic brain MRI synthesis. This model effectively tackles data scarcity and privacy issues by integrating semantic conditioning. This involves the channel-wise concatenation of a conditioning image to the model input, enabling control in image generation. Med-DDPM demonstrates superior stability and performance compared to existing 3D brain imaging synthesis methods. It generates diverse, anatomically coherent images with high visual fidelity. In terms of dice score accuracy in the tumor segmentation task, Med-DDPM achieves 0.6207, close to the 0.6531 accuracy of real images, and outperforms baseline models. Combined with real images, it further increases segmentation accuracy to 0.6675, showing the potential of our proposed method for data augmentation. This model represents the first use of a diffusion model in 3D semantic brain MRI synthesis, producing high-quality images. Its semantic conditioning feature also shows potential for image anonymization in biomedical imaging, addressing data and privacy issues. We provide the code and model weights for Med-DDPM on our GitHub repository (https://github.com/mobaidoctor/med-ddpm/) to support reproducibility.

Key facts. Cited by 86 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Medical imaging and segmentation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models. Builds on 27 of its 49 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 29 May 2023.

Builds on

27 of 49 references.

Closest ancestors · 3

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2022Diffusion Models for Medical Image Analysis: A Comprehensive Survey14 Nov
  2. 2022Brain Imaging Generation with Latent Diffusion Models15 Sep
  3. 2022Unsupervised Medical Image Translation with Adversarial Diffusion Models17 Jul

Other references · 24

  1. 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 21,076
  2. 2021Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesiscited by 8,255
  3. 2015Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Visioncited by 5,475
  4. 2016Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networkscited by 4,527
  5. 2021Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 3,761
  6. 20163D U-Net: Learning Dense Volumetric Segmentation from Sparse Annotationcited by 1,476
  7. 2019Semantic Image Synthesis with Spatially-Adaptive Normalizationcited by 1,299
  8. 2017A Survey on Deep Learning in Medical Image Analysiscited by 1,186
  9. 2021Cascaded Diffusion Models for High Fidelity Image Generationcited by 1,163
  10. 2022Diffusion Models: A Comprehensive Survey of Methods and Applicationscited by 1,114
  11. 2019Med3D: Transfer Learning for 3D Medical Image Analysiscited by 288
  12. 2017Learning to Discover Cross-Domain Relations with Generative Adversarial Networkscited by 278
12 more
  1. 2018Generative Adversarial Network in Medical Imaging: A Reviewcited by 257
  2. 2018Medical Image Synthesis for Data Augmentation and Anonymization using Generative Adversarial Networkscited by 147
  3. 2018GANs for Medical Image Analysiscited by 81
  4. 2019Generation of 3D Brain MRI Using Auto-Encoding Generative Adversarial Networkscited by 65
  5. 2021GANs for Medical Image Synthesis: An Empirical Studycited by 65
  6. 2020Hierarchical Amortized Training for Memory-efficient High Resolution 3D GANcited by 60
  7. 2022Transformers in Medical Image Analysis: A Reviewcited by 41
  8. 2022Can segmentation models be trained with fully synthetically generated data?cited by 37
  9. 20213D-StyleGAN: A Style-Based Generative Adversarial Network for Generative Modeling of Three-Dimensional Medical Imagescited by 32
  10. 2019Overfitting of neural nets under class imbalance: Analysis and improvements for segmentationcited by 27
  11. 2020Red-GAN: Attacking class imbalance via conditioned generation. Yet another perspective on medical image synthesis for skin lesion dermoscopy and brain tumor MRIcited by 17
  12. 2020Deep Learning Based Segmentation of Various Brain Lesions for Radiosurgerycited by 3

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2023: 1; 2024: 19; 2025: 33; 2026: 33.

86 papers.

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  1. 2024Improving Diffusion Inverse Problem Solving with Decoupled Noise Annealingcited by 163
  2. 2025Flow Matching for Medical Image Synthesis: Bridging the Gap Between Speed and Qualitycited by 25
  3. 2023DiffBoost: Enhancing Medical Image Segmentation via Text-Guided Diffusion Modelcited by 23
  4. 2024Robust CLIP-Based Detector for Exposing Diffusion Model-Generated Imagescited by 20
  5. 2024vesselFM: A Foundation Model for Universal 3D Blood Vessel Segmentationcited by 18
  6. 2024Deep Generative Models for 3D Medical Image Synthesiscited by 14
  7. 2025MedSegFactory: Text-Guided Generation of Medical Image-Mask Pairscited by 13
  8. 2024Polyp-DDPM: Diffusion-Based Semantic Polyp Synthesis for Enhanced Segmentationcited by 8
  9. 2025A Review on Generative AI For Text-To-Image and Image-To-Image Generation and Implications To Scientific Imagescited by 8
  10. 2025Generative Artificial Intelligence in Medical Imaging: Foundations, Progress, and Clinical Translationcited by 8
  11. 2024Synthetic Data in Radiological Imaging: Current State and Future Outlookcited by 7
  12. 2024Deformation-Recovery Diffusion Model (DRDM): Instance Deformation for Image Manipulation and Synthesiscited by 7
38 more
  1. 2024MedDiff-FM: A Diffusion-based Foundation Model for Versatile Medical Image Applicationscited by 7
  2. 2025Lung-DDPM: Semantic Layout-guided Diffusion Models for Thoracic CT Image Synthesiscited by 7
  3. 2025WASABI: A Metric for Evaluating Morphometric Plausibility of Synthetic Brain MRIscited by 5
  4. 2025ReGuidance: A Simple Diffusion Wrapper for Boosting Sample Quality on Hard Inverse Problemscited by 5
  5. 2024Ctrl-GenAug: Controllable Generative Augmentation for Medical Sequence Classificationcited by 4
  6. 2024FairSkin: Fair Diffusion for Skin Disease Image Generationcited by 4
  7. 2025Lung-DDPM+: Efficient Thoracic CT Image Synthesis using Diffusion Probabilistic Modelcited by 4
  8. 2024Super-resolution of biomedical volumes with 2D supervisioncited by 3
  9. 2024Volumetric Conditioning Module to Control Pretrained Diffusion Models for 3D Medical Imagescited by 3
  10. 2024MRGen: Segmentation Data Engine for Underrepresented MRI Modalitiescited by 3
  11. 2025MedLoRD: A Medical Low-Resource Diffusion Model for High-Resolution 3D CT Image Synthesiscited by 3
  12. 2025STeP: A Framework for Solving Scientific Video Inverse Problems with Spatiotemporal Diffusion Priorscited by 3
  13. 2025EquiReg: Equivariance Regularized Diffusion for Inverse Problemscited by 3
  14. 2024Label-Efficient Data Augmentation with Video Diffusion Models for Guidewire Segmentation in Cardiac Fluoroscopycited by 2
  15. 2025seg2med: a bridge from artificial anatomy to multimodal medical imagescited by 2
  16. 2025CLAIM: Clinically-Guided LGE Augmentation for Realistic and Diverse Myocardial Scar Synthesis and Segmentationcited by 2
  17. 2025Flow Matching for Conditional MRI-CT and CBCT-CT Image Synthesiscited by 2
  18. 2025Diffusion-Driven Generation of Minimally Preprocessed Brain MRIcited by 2
  19. 2025MRIQT: Physics-Aware Diffusion Model for Image Quality Transfer in Neonatal Ultra-Low-Field MRIcited by 2
  20. 2025Early Lung Cancer Diagnosis from Virtual Follow-up LDCT Generation via Correlational Autoencoder and Latent Flow Matchingcited by 2
  21. 2026Auditing Sybil: Explaining Deep Lung Cancer Risk Prediction Through Generative Interventional Attributionscited by 2
  22. 2026TumorFlow: Physics-Guided Longitudinal MRI Synthesis of Glioblastoma Growthcited by 2
  23. 2026Multiscale Structure-Guided Latent Diffusion for Multimodal MRI Translationcited by 2
  24. 2024Fundus to Fluorescein Angiography Video Generation as a Retinal Generative Foundation Modelcited by 1
  25. 2024FFA Sora, video generation as fundus fluorescein angiography simulatorcited by 1
  26. 2025Influence of High-Performance Image-to-Image Translation Networks on Clinical Visual Assessment and Outcome Prediction: Utilizing Ultrasound to MRI Translation in Prostate Cancercited by 1
  27. 2025Pathological MRI Segmentation by Synthetic Pathological Data Generation in Fetuses and Neonatescited by 1
  28. 2025Diffusing the Blind Spot: Uterine MRI Synthesis with Diffusion Modelscited by 1
  29. 2025Unsupervised Deep Generative Models for Anomaly Detection in Neuroimaging: A Systematic Scoping Reviewcited by 1
  30. 2025HEAL: Learning-Free Source Free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Cross-Modality Medical Image Segmentationcited by 1
  31. 2025Restora-Flow: Mask-Guided Image Restoration with Flow Matchingcited by 1
  32. 20263D Conditional Image Synthesis of Left Atrial LGE MRI from Composite Semantic Maskscited by 1
  33. 2026Cortex-Grounded Diffusion Models for Brain Image Generationcited by 1
  34. 2026MRI Cross-Modal Synthesis: A Comparative Study of Generative Models for T1-to-T2 Reconstructioncited by 1
  35. 2026Optimizing 3D Diffusion Models for Medical Imaging via Multi-Scale Reward Learningcited by 1
  36. 2026Geometrically Constrained Stenosis Editing in Coronary Angiography via Entropic Optimal Transportcited by 1
  37. 2026Knowledge-Guided 3D CT Generation: A Conditioning-Centric Taxonomycited by 1
  38. 2026Beyond Representation Learning: A Systematic Study of Joint-Embedding Predictive Generation for 3D Brain MRIcited by 1

50 most cited of 86 All 86 (JSON)

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  1. 2025Diffusion Models for conditional MRI generation
  2. 2022Medical Diffusion: Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models for 3D Medical Image Generation
  3. 2026Phase-map synthesis from magnitude-only MR images using conditional score-based diffusion models with application in training of accelerated MRI reconstruction models
  4. 2026VS-DDPM: Efficient Low-Cost Diffusion Model for Medical Modality Translation
  5. 2024cWDM: Conditional Wavelet Diffusion Models for Cross-Modality 3D Medical Image Synthesis
  6. 2025Lesion-Aware Post-Training of Latent Diffusion Models for Synthesizing Diffusion MRI from CT Perfusion
  7. 2026Balancing Fidelity, Utility, and Privacy in Synthetic Cardiac MRI Generation: A Comparative Study
  8. 2025Deep generative priors for 3D brain analysis