MedDiff-FM: A Diffusion-based Foundation Model for Versatile Medical Image Applications
On the map: Diffusion models → Medical imaging and segmentation
Abstract (arXiv)
Diffusion models have achieved significant success in both natural image and medical image domains, encompassing a wide range of applications. Previous investigations in medical images have often been constrained to specific anatomical regions, particular applications, and limited datasets, resulting in isolated diffusion models. This paper introduces a diffusion-based foundation model to address a diverse range of medical image tasks, namely MedDiff-FM. MedDiff-FM leverages 3D CT images from multiple publicly available datasets, covering anatomical regions from head to abdomen, to pre-train a diffusion foundation model, and explores the capabilities of the diffusion foundation model across a variety of application scenarios. The diffusion foundation model handles multi-level integrated image processing both at the image-level and patch-level, utilizes position embedding to establish multi-level spatial relationships, and leverages region classes and anatomical structures to capture certain anatomical regions. MedDiff-FM manages several downstream tasks seamlessly, including image denoising, anomaly detection, and image synthesis. MedDiff-FM is also capable of performing super-resolution, lesion generation, and lesion inpainting by rapidly fine-tuning the diffusion foundation model using ControlNet with task-specific conditions. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of MedDiff-FM in addressing diverse downstream medical image tasks.
Key facts. Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Medical imaging and segmentation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models. Builds on 71 of its 99 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 20 Oct 2024.
Builds on
71 of 99 references.
Closest ancestors · 14
Same direction, newest first
- 2024MAISI: Medical AI for Synthetic Imaging13 Sep
- 2024DiNO-Diffusion. Scaling Medical Diffusion via Self-Supervised Pre-Training16 Jul
- 2023Semantic Image Synthesis for Abdominal CT11 Dec
- 2023DiffBoost: Enhancing Medical Image Segmentation via Text-Guided Diffusion Model19 Oct
- 2023ArSDM: Colonoscopy Images Synthesis with Adaptive Refinement Semantic Diffusion Models3 Sep
- 2023Mask, Stitch, and Re-Sample: Enhancing Robustness and Generalizability in Anomaly Detection through Automatic Diffusion Models31 May
- 2023Conditional Diffusion Models for Semantic 3D Brain MRI Synthesis29 May
- 2023Diffusion Probabilistic Priors for Zero-Shot Low-Dose CT Image Denoising25 May
- 2023CoreDiff: Contextual Error-Modulated Generalized Diffusion Model for Low-Dose CT Denoising and Generalization4 Apr
- 2023NASDM: Nuclei-Aware Semantic Histopathology Image Generation Using Diffusion Models20 Mar
- 2023DDM2: Self-Supervised Diffusion MRI Denoising with Generative Diffusion Models6 Feb
- 2022Diffusion Models for Medical Image Analysis: A Comprehensive Survey14 Nov
2 more
Other references · 57
- 2015Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognitioncited by 51,809
- 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 20,851
- 2015U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentationcited by 19,604
- 2021High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Modelscited by 18,694
- 2018The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metriccited by 11,029
- 2023Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Modelscited by 5,466
- 2022InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructionscited by 2,591
- 2021SDEdit: Guided Image Synthesis and Editing with Stochastic Differential Equationscited by 1,903
- 2023Consistency Modelscited by 1,778
- 2021Image Super-Resolution via Iterative Refinementcited by 1,506
- 2023Align your Latents: High-Resolution Video Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Modelscited by 1,465
- 2022RePaint: Inpainting using Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 1,419
38 more
- 2021Palette: Image-to-Image Diffusion Modelscited by 1,296
- 2022Imagic: Text-Based Real Image Editing with Diffusion Modelscited by 1,172
- 2022Diffusion Models in Vision: A Surveycited by 1,008
- 2022Tune-A-Video: One-Shot Tuning of Image Diffusion Models for Text-to-Video Generationcited by 958
- 2022Plug-and-Play Diffusion Features for Text-Driven Image-to-Image Translationcited by 897
- 2021Towards Total Recall in Industrial Anomaly Detectioncited by 772
- 2021The Medical Segmentation Decathloncited by 620
- 2022TotalSegmentator: robust segmentation of 104 anatomical structures in CT imagescited by 597
- 2020PaDiM: a Patch Distribution Modeling Framework for Anomaly Detection and Localizationcited by 591
- 2021DRAEM -- A discriminatively trained reconstruction embedding for surface anomaly detectioncited by 510
- 2022Anomaly Detection via Reverse Distillation from One-Class Embeddingcited by 419
- 2019A large annotated medical image dataset for the development and evaluation of segmentation algorithmscited by 371
- 2023ResShift: Efficient Diffusion Model for Image Super-resolution by Residual Shiftingcited by 360
- 2022AMOS: A Large-Scale Abdominal Multi-Organ Benchmark for Versatile Medical Image Segmentationcited by 347
- 2023Denoising Diffusion Models for Plug-and-Play Image Restorationcited by 335
- 2021CFLOW-AD: Real-Time Unsupervised Anomaly Detection with Localization via Conditional Normalizing Flowscited by 320
- 2020CHAOS Challenge -- Combined (CT-MR) Healthy Abdominal Organ Segmentationcited by 307
- 2020Multiresolution Knowledge Distillation for Anomaly Detectioncited by 285
- 2019Med3D: Transfer Learning for 3D Medical Image Analysiscited by 282
- 2023Unleashing Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Visual Perceptioncited by 266
- 2023LayoutDiffusion: Controllable Diffusion Model for Layout-to-image Generationcited by 258
- 2023SimpleNet: A Simple Network for Image Anomaly Detection and Localizationcited by 256
- 2017Low-Dose CT with a Residual Encoder-Decoder Convolutional Neural Network (RED-CNN)cited by 224
- 2020AbdomenCT-1K: Is Abdominal Organ Segmentation A Solved Problem?cited by 222
- 2022Restoring Vision in Adverse Weather Conditions with Patch-Based Denoising Diffusion Modelscited by 215
- 2022CFA: Coupled-hypersphere-based Feature Adaptation for Target-Oriented Anomaly Localizationcited by 135
- 2022Semantic Image Synthesis via Diffusion Modelscited by 131
- 2023Patch Diffusion: Faster and More Data-Efficient Training of Diffusion Modelscited by 131
- 2023BMAD: Benchmarks for Medical Anomaly Detectioncited by 81
- 2024Towards Generalizable Tumor Synthesiscited by 65
- 2014A New 2.5D Representation for Lymph Node Detection using Random Sets of Deep Convolutional Neural Network Observationscited by 56
- 2018Can Deep Learning Outperform Modern Commercial CT Image Reconstruction Methods?cited by 53
- 2022CTformer: Convolution-free Token2Token Dilated Vision Transformer for Low-dose CT Denoisingcited by 46
- 2023Text-image Alignment for Diffusion-based Perceptioncited by 42
- 2023MedSyn: Text-guided Anatomy-aware Synthesis of High-Fidelity 3D CT Imagescited by 41
- 2020SAINT: Spatially Aware Interpolation NeTwork for Medical Slice Synthesiscited by 37
- 2022High-Fidelity Guided Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Modelscited by 36
- 2023MedGen3D: A Deep Generative Framework for Paired 3D Image and Mask Generationcited by 34
50 most cited of 57 All 57 (JSON)
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Citing papers per year: 2025: 4; 2026: 3.
7 papers.
- 2025Generative Artificial Intelligence in Medical Imaging: Foundations, Progress, and Clinical Translationcited by 8
- 2026Scalable next-scale autoregression for medical image generation across anatomical regionscited by 3
- 2025A-IDE : Agent-Integrated Denoising Expertscited by 1
- 2026BrainG3N: A Dual-Purpose Tokenizer for Controllable 3D Brain MRI Generationcited by 1
- 2025SkinDualGen: Prompt-Driven Diffusion for Simultaneous Image-Mask Generation in Skin Lesionscited by 0
- 2025Establishing Stochastic Object Models from Noisy Data via Ambient Measurement-Integrated Diffusioncited by 0
- 2026Multiscale Hypersonic Boundary Layer Reconstruction via Spectral Binning and Subdomain-wise Conditional Diffusioncited by 0
- 2026BrainG3N: A Dual-Purpose Tokenizer for Controllable 3D Brain MRI Generation17 Jun 2026
- 2026Multiscale Hypersonic Boundary Layer Reconstruction via Spectral Binning and Subdomain-wise Conditional Diffusion12 Jun 2026
- 2026Scalable next-scale autoregression for medical image generation across anatomical regions16 Feb 2026
- 2025Establishing Stochastic Object Models from Noisy Data via Ambient Measurement-Integrated Diffusion16 Dec 2025
- 2025Generative Artificial Intelligence in Medical Imaging: Foundations, Progress, and Clinical Translation7 Aug 2025
- 2025SkinDualGen: Prompt-Driven Diffusion for Simultaneous Image-Mask Generation in Skin Lesions26 Jul 2025
- 2025A-IDE : Agent-Integrated Denoising Experts21 Mar 2025
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- 20243D MedDiffusion: A 3D Medical Latent Diffusion Model for Controllable and High-quality Medical Image Generation
- 2025MedDIFT: Multi-Scale Diffusion-Based Correspondence in 3D Medical Imaging
- 2025MedCondDiff: Lightweight, Robust, Semantically Guided Diffusion for Medical Image Segmentation
- 2023FDDM: Unsupervised Medical Image Translation with a Frequency-Decoupled Diffusion Model
- 2025Computationally Efficient Diffusion Models in Medical Imaging: A Comprehensive Review
- 2023Memory-Efficient 3D Denoising Diffusion Models for Medical Image Processing
- 2025MedDiff-FT: Data-Efficient Diffusion Model Fine-tuning with Structural Guidance for Controllable Medical Image Synthesis