# Leveraging healthy population variability in deep learning unsupervised anomaly detection in brain FDG PET

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.12081 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12081/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 3 of its 16 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Nov 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6114/) (2013)
- [Autoencoders for Unsupervised Anomaly Segmentation in Brain MR Images: A Comparative Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.03271/) (2020)
- [DiffuseVAE: Efficient, Controllable and High-Fidelity Generation from Low-Dimensional Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.00308/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Evaluation of pseudo-healthy image reconstruction for anomaly detection with deep generative models: Application to brain FDG PET](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16363/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Reconstruction-Based Out-of-Distribution Detection in Brain MRI with Model and Metric Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17586/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised Deep Generative Models for Anomaly Detection in Neuroimaging: A Systematic Scoping Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14462/) (2025)
- [Self-Supervised Masked Mesh Learning for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection on 3D Cortical Surfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05580/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Unsupervised anomaly detection is a popular approach for the analysis of neuroimaging data as it allows to identify a wide variety of anomalies from unlabelled data. It relies on building a subject-specific model of healthy appearance to which a subject's image can be compared to detect anomalies. In the literature, it is common for anomaly detection to rely on analysing the residual image between the subject's image and its pseudo-healthy reconstruction. This approach however has limitations partly due to the pseudo-healthy reconstructions being imperfect and to the lack of natural thresholding mechanism. Our proposed method, inspired by Z-scores, leverages the healthy population variability to overcome these limitations. Our experiments conducted on FDG PET scans from the ADNI database demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in accurately identifying Alzheimer's disease related anomalies.