# Unsupervised Detection of Fetal Brain Anomalies using Denoising Diffusion Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.03654 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03654/

## 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 21 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Aug 2024.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Generalized Out-of-Distribution Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11334/) (2021)
- [Likelihood Ratios for Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02845/) (2019)
- [Diffusion Models for Medical Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04306/) (2022)
- [Denoising diffusion models for out-of-distribution detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07740/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Detection of Lesions in Brain MRI using constrained adversarial auto-encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.04972/) (2018)
- [SonoNet: Real-Time Detection and Localisation of Fetal Standard Scan Planes in Freehand Ultrasound](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.05601/) (2016)
- [The role of noise in denoising models for anomaly detection in medical images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08330/) (2023)
- [Human-level Performance On Automatic Head Biometrics In Fetal Ultrasound Using Fully Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.09102/) (2018)
- [Adversarial vulnerability of powerful near out-of-distribution detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.07012/) (2022)
- [FetalNet: Multi-task Deep Learning Framework for Fetal Ultrasound Biometric Measurements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06943/) (2021)
- [Diffusion-based Iterative Counterfactual Explanations for Fetal Ultrasound Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08700/) (2024)
- [DTU-Net: Learning Topological Similarity for Curvilinear Structure Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11115/) (2022)
- [Dual Conditioned Diffusion Models for Out-Of-Distribution Detection: Application to Fetal Ultrasound Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00469/) (2023)
- [DISYRE: Diffusion-Inspired SYnthetic REstoration for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15453/) (2023)
- [Towards Realistic Ultrasound Fetal Brain Imaging Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03941/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Anomaly Detection using Aggregated Normative Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01904/) (2023)
- [Learning semantic image quality for fetal ultrasound from noisy ranking annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.08294/) (2024)
- [Explainable fetal ultrasound quality assessment with progressive concept bottleneck models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10630/) (2022)

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

- [Diffusion Models in Medical Image Inpainting: Challenges, Solution Taxonomy, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.21904/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Congenital malformations of the brain are among the most common fetal abnormalities that impact fetal development. Previous anomaly detection methods on ultrasound images are based on supervised learning, rely on manual annotations, and risk missing underrepresented categories. In this work, we frame fetal brain anomaly detection as an unsupervised task using diffusion models. To this end, we employ an inpainting-based Noise Agnostic Anomaly Detection approach that identifies the abnormality using diffusion-reconstructed fetal brain images from multiple noise levels. Our approach only requires normal fetal brain ultrasound images for training, addressing the limited availability of abnormal data. Our experiments on a real-world clinical dataset show the potential of using unsupervised methods for fetal brain anomaly detection. Additionally, we comprehensively evaluate how different noise types affect diffusion models in the fetal anomaly detection domain.