# A Generalist Model for Diverse Text-Guided Medical Image Synthesis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.09806 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09806/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 68 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [Reproducible scaling laws for contrastive language-image learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07143/) (2022)
- [Extracting Training Data from Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13188/) (2023)
- [Differential Privacy Has Disparate Impact on Model Accuracy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12101/) (2019)
- [Towards Generalist Biomedical AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14334/) (2023)
- [Diffusion Models for Medical Image Analysis: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07804/) (2022)
- [Text-to-image Diffusion Models in Generative AI: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07909/) (2023)
- [Text-to-Image Diffusion Models are Zero-Shot Classifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15233/) (2023)
- [Disparities in Dermatology AI: Assessments Using Diverse Clinical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.08006/) (2021)
- [Generative models improve fairness of medical classifiers under distribution shifts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09218/) (2023)
- [SAR-RARP50: Segmentation of surgical instrumentation and Action Recognition on Robot-Assisted Radical Prostatectomy Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00496/) (2023)
- [MedSyn: Text-guided Anatomy-aware Synthesis of High-Fidelity 3D CT Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03559/) (2023)
- [Deep Learning-based Patient Re-identification Is able to Exploit the Biometric Nature of Medical Chest X-ray Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08562/) (2021)
- [Overcoming Barriers to Data Sharing with Medical Image Generation: A Comprehensive Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03769/) (2020)
- [How to Fool Radiologists with Generative Adversarial Networks? A Visual Turing Test for Lung Cancer Diagnosis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09762/) (2017)
- [Federated Learning for Medical Applications: A Taxonomy, Current Trends, Challenges, and Future Research Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03392/) (2022)
- [Augmenting medical image classifiers with synthetic data from latent diffusion models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12453/) (2023)
- [Medical diffusion on a budget: Textual Inversion for medical image generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13430/) (2023)
- [An Overview of Federated Deep Learning Privacy Attacks and Defensive Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04676/) (2020)
- [Preserving Privacy in Surgical Video Analysis Using Artificial Intelligence: A Deep Learning Classifier to Identify Out-of-Body Scenes in Endoscopic Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07053/) (2023)
- [Improving Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease Classification Performance With Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06507/) (2023)
- [Synthetic Medical Imaging Generation with Generative Adversarial Networks For Plain Radiographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19107/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [SurGen: Text-Guided Diffusion Model for Surgical Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14028/) (2024)
- [MedEBench: Diagnosing Reliability in Text-Guided Medical Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01921/) (2025)
- [Generative Artificial Intelligence in Medical Imaging: Foundations, Progress, and Clinical Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09177/) (2025)
- [Radiology Report Conditional 3D CT Generation with Multi Encoder Latent diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.14780/) (2025)
- [When the Edit Changes the Patient: Measuring Identity Preservation in Counterfactual Retinal Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.23024/) (2026)
- [Align Your Query: Representation Alignment for Multimodality Medical Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.02789/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep learning algorithms require extensive data to achieve robust performance. However, data availability is often restricted in the medical domain due to patient privacy concerns. Synthetic data presents a possible solution to these challenges. Image generative models have found increasing use for medical applications, but are often task-specific, thus limiting their scalability. Moreover, existing models frequently rely on private datasets for training, which constrain their reproducibility. To address this, we introduce MediSyn: an open-access, generalist, text-guided latent diffusion model capable of generating synthetic images across 6 medical specialties and 10 imaging modalities, while being trained exclusively on publicly available data. Through extensive experimentation, we provide several key contributions. First, we demonstrate that training a generative model on visually diverse medical images does not degrade synthetic image quality. Second, we show that this generalist approach is substantially more computationally efficient than a coordinated suite of task-specific models. Third, we establish that a generalist model can produce realistic, text-aligned synthetic images across visually and medically distinct modalities, as validated by expert physicians. Fourth, we provide empirical evidence that these synthetic images are visually distinct from their corresponding real patient images, alleviating concerns about data memorization in image generative models. Finally, we demonstrate that a generalist model can produce synthetic images that improve classifier performance in data-limited settings across multiple medical specialties. Altogether, our findings highlight the immense potential of generalist image generative models to accelerate algorithmic research and development in medicine.