# MAISI: Medical AI for Synthetic Imaging

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.11169 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11169/

## Key facts

- Cited by 87 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Medical imaging and segmentation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 44 of its 85 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Sep 2024.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [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)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [Megatron-LM: Training Multi-Billion Parameter Language Models Using Model Parallelism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.08053/) (2019)
- [Image Super-Resolution via Iterative Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07636/) (2021)
- [T2I-Adapter: Learning Adapters to Dig out More Controllable Ability for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08453/) (2023)
- [Normalizing Flows for Probabilistic Modeling and Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02762/) (2019)
- [Diffusion Models: A Comprehensive Survey of Methods and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00796/) (2022)
- [Diffusion Models in Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.04747/) (2022)
- [An Introduction to Variational Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02691/) (2019)
- [Vector-quantized Image Modeling with Improved VQGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04627/) (2021)
- [The Medical Segmentation Decathlon](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05735/) (2021)
- [TotalSegmentator: robust segmentation of 104 anatomical structures in CT images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.05868/) (2022)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks: An Overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.07035/) (2017)
- [Identifying the Best Machine Learning Algorithms for Brain Tumor Segmentation, Progression Assessment, and Overall Survival Prediction in the BRATS Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.02629/) (2018)
- [MONAI: An open-source framework for deep learning in healthcare](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.02701/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Generative Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.02646/) (2022)
- [CLIP-Driven Universal Model for Organ Segmentation and Tumor Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00785/) (2023)
- [Medical Image Synthesis for Data Augmentation and Anonymization using Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10225/) (2018)
- [Translating and Segmenting Multimodal Medical Volumes with Cycle- and Shape-Consistency Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.09655/) (2018)
- [CT Super-resolution GAN Constrained by the Identical, Residual, and Cycle Learning Ensemble(GAN-CIRCLE)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.04256/) (2018)
- [3D Deep Learning on Medical Images: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00218/) (2020)
- [Anatomically-Controllable Medical Image Generation with Segmentation-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05210/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 87)

- [3D MedDiffusion: A 3D Medical Latent Diffusion Model for Controllable and High-quality Medical Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13059/) (2024)
- [MAISI-v2: Accelerated 3D High-Resolution Medical Image Synthesis with Rectified Flow and Region-specific Contrastive Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05772/) (2025)
- [Better Tokens for Better 3D: Advancing Vision-Language Modeling in 3D Medical Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.20639/) (2025)
- [MedSegFactory: Text-Guided Generation of Medical Image-Mask Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.06897/) (2025)
- [Text2CT: Towards 3D CT Volume Generation from Free-text Descriptions Using Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04522/) (2025)
- [Scaling Tumor Segmentation: Best Lessons from Real and Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14831/) (2025)
- [Conditional Diffusion Models are Medical Image Classifiers that Provide Explainability and Uncertainty for Free](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.03687/) (2025)
- [MedDiff-FM: A Diffusion-based Foundation Model for Versatile Medical Image Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15432/) (2024)
- [From Alignment to Synthesis: Contrastive Volumetric Grounding for Text-to-CT Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00633/) (2025)
- [Generative Autoregressive Transformers for Model-Agnostic Federated MRI Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.04521/) (2025)
- [CoCoLIT: ControlNet-Conditioned Latent Image Translation for MRI to Amyloid PET Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01292/) (2025)
- [CTFlow: Video-Inspired Latent Flow Matching for 3D CT Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.12900/) (2025)
- [Virtual Full-stack Scanning of Brain MRI via Imputing Any Quantised Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.18328/) (2025)
- [Towards Virtual Clinical Trials of Radiology AI with Conditional Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09688/) (2025)
- [MRGen: Segmentation Data Engine for Underrepresented MRI Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04106/) (2024)
- [Automating RT Planning at Scale: High Quality Data For AI Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.11803/) (2025)
- [Diffusion Models for conditional MRI generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18620/) (2025)
- [MedLoRD: A Medical Low-Resource Diffusion Model for High-Resolution 3D CT Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13211/) (2025)
- [Radiology Report Conditional 3D CT Generation with Multi Encoder Latent diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.14780/) (2025)
- [Uncertainty-Aware ControlNet: Bridging Domain Gaps with Synthetic Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11346/) (2025)
- [Scalable next-scale autoregression for medical image generation across anatomical regions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.14512/) (2026)
- [MAESIL: Masked Autoencoder for Enhanced Self-supervised Medical Image Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.00514/) (2026)
- [Artificial Intelligence for Biomedical Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.07619/) (2024)
- [Bounding Box-Guided Diffusion for Synthesizing Industrial Images and Segmentation Map](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03623/) (2025)
- [High Volume Rate 3D Ultrasound Reconstruction with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22090/) (2025)
- [NeRF-based CBCT Reconstruction needs Normalization and Initialization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.19742/) (2025)
- [MedSymmFlow: Bridging Generative Modeling and Classification in Medical Imaging through Symmetrical Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19098/) (2025)
- [Towards Robust In-Context Learning for Medical Image Segmentation via Data Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.19711/) (2025)
- [Diffusion-Driven Generation of Minimally Preprocessed Brain MRI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.26834/) (2025)
- [GRASP: Guided Residual Adapters with Sample-wise Partitioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.01675/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Medical imaging analysis faces challenges such as data scarcity, high annotation costs, and privacy concerns. This paper introduces the Medical AI for Synthetic Imaging (MAISI), an innovative approach using the diffusion model to generate synthetic 3D computed tomography (CT) images to address those challenges. MAISI leverages the foundation volume compression network and the latent diffusion model to produce high-resolution CT images (up to a landmark volume dimension of 512 x 512 x 768 ) with flexible volume dimensions and voxel spacing. By incorporating ControlNet, MAISI can process organ segmentation, including 127 anatomical structures, as additional conditions and enables the generation of accurately annotated synthetic images that can be used for various downstream tasks. Our experiment results show that MAISI's capabilities in generating realistic, anatomically accurate images for diverse regions and conditions reveal its promising potential to mitigate challenges using synthetic data.