# Discrepancy-based Diffusion Models for Lesion Detection in Brain MRI

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.04974 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04974/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Medical imaging and segmentation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 29 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 May 2024.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Medical imaging and segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/medical-imaging-and-segmentation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [SegNet: A Deep Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Architecture for Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.00561/) (2015)
- [A Survey on Deep Learning in Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05747/) (2017)
- [A Survey on Visual Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12556/) (2020)
- [DRAEM -- A discriminatively trained reconstruction embedding for surface anomaly detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07610/) (2021)
- [A Survey of Convolutional Neural Networks: Analysis, Applications, and Prospects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02806/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models for Medical Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04306/) (2022)
- [Diffusion Models for Implicit Image Segmentation Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03145/) (2021)
- [MedSegDiff: Medical Image Segmentation with Diffusion Probabilistic Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00611/) (2022)
- [Autoencoders for Unsupervised Anomaly Segmentation in Brain MR Images: A Comparative Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.03271/) (2020)
- [Brain Tumor Segmentation with Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.03540/) (2015)
- [On the Challenges and Perspectives of Foundation Models for Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05705/) (2023)
- [Deep Learning for Medical Anomaly Detection -- A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02364/) (2020)
- [MedSegDiff-V2: Diffusion based Medical Image Segmentation with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11798/) (2023)
- [Self-Supervised Predictive Convolutional Attentive Block for Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09099/) (2021)
- [Deep Learning for Medical Image Processing: Overview, Challenges and Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.06825/) (2017)
- [Fast Unsupervised Brain Anomaly Detection and Segmentation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.03461/) (2022)
- [Ambiguous Medical Image Segmentation using Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04745/) (2023)
- [GANs for Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.06222/) (2018)
- [Comparison of Deep Learning Approaches for Multi-Label Chest X-Ray Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02315/) (2018)
- [What is Healthy? Generative Counterfactual Diffusion for Lesion Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12268/) (2022)
- [Patched Diffusion Models for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection in Brain MRI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03758/) (2023)
- [Diff-UNet: A Diffusion Embedded Network for Volumetric Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10326/) (2023)
- [Anomaly Detection for Skin Disease Images Using Variational Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.01349/) (2018)
- [Deep Learning Based Detection and Correction of Cardiac MR Motion Artefacts During Reconstruction for High-Quality Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.05370/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Applications of Large Models in Medicine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17132/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) have exhibited significant effectiveness in computer vision tasks, particularly in image generation. However, their notable performance heavily relies on labelled datasets, which limits their application in medical images due to the associated high-cost annotations. Current DPM-related methods for lesion detection in medical imaging, which can be categorized into two distinct approaches, primarily rely on image-level annotations. The first approach, based on anomaly detection, involves learning reference healthy brain representations and identifying anomalies based on the difference in inference results. In contrast, the second approach, resembling a segmentation task, employs only the original brain multi-modalities as prior information for generating pixel-level annotations. In this paper, our proposed model - discrepancy distribution medical diffusion (DDMD) - for lesion detection in brain MRI introduces a novel framework by incorporating distinctive discrepancy features, deviating from the conventional direct reliance on image-level annotations or the original brain modalities. In our method, the inconsistency in image-level annotations is translated into distribution discrepancies among heterogeneous samples while preserving information within homogeneous samples. This property retains pixel-wise uncertainty and facilitates an implicit ensemble of segmentation, ultimately enhancing the overall detection performance. Thorough experiments conducted on the BRATS2020 benchmark dataset containing multimodal MRI scans for brain tumour detection demonstrate the great performance of our approach in comparison to state-of-the-art methods.