VGDM: Vision-Guided Diffusion Model for Brain Tumor Detection and Segmentation
On the map: Diffusion models → Medical imaging and segmentation
Abstract (arXiv)
Accurate detection and segmentation of brain tumors from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are essential for diagnosis, treatment planning, and clinical monitoring. While convolutional architectures such as U-Net have long been the backbone of medical image segmentation, their limited capacity to capture long-range dependencies constrains performance on complex tumor structures. Recent advances in diffusion models have demonstrated strong potential for generating high-fidelity medical images and refining segmentation boundaries. In this work, we propose VGDM: Vision-Guided Diffusion Model for Brain Tumor Detection and Segmentation framework, a transformer-driven diffusion framework for brain tumor detection and segmentation. By embedding a vision transformer at the core of the diffusion process, the model leverages global contextual reasoning together with iterative denoising to enhance both volumetric accuracy and boundary precision. The transformer backbone enables more effective modeling of spatial relationships across entire MRI volumes, while diffusion refinement mitigates voxel-level errors and recovers fine-grained tumor details. This hybrid design provides a pathway toward improved robustness and scalability in neuro-oncology, moving beyond conventional U-Net baselines. Experimental validation on MRI brain tumor datasets demonstrates consistent gains in Dice similarity and Hausdorff distance, underscoring the potential of transformer-guided diffusion models to advance the state of the art in tumor segmentation.
Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Medical imaging and segmentation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models. Builds on 8 of its 13 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 2 Oct 2025.
Builds on
8 of 13 references.
Closest ancestors · 3
Same direction, newest first
- 2025ReCoSeg++:Extended Residual-Guided Cross-Modal Diffusion for Brain Tumor Segmentation1 Aug
- 2025DMCIE: Diffusion Model with Concatenation of Inputs and Errors to Improve the Accuracy of the Segmentation of Brain Tumors in MRI Images1 Jul
- 2023DDMM-Synth: A Denoising Diffusion Model for Cross-modal Medical Image Synthesis with Sparse-view Measurement Embedding28 Mar
Other references · 5
- 2020An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scalecited by 29,915
- 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 20,851
- 2021Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windowscited by 12,082
- 2021TransBTS: Multimodal Brain Tumor Segmentation Using Transformercited by 265
- 2025Mitigating Catastrophic Forgetting in the Incremental Learning of Medical Imagescited by 3
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 1.
1 paper.
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2025NNDM: NN_UNet Diffusion Model for Brain Tumor Segmentation
- 2026Diffusion-Refined Segmentation and Vision-Language Interpretation for Pediatric Brain Tumor MRI
- 2025MedCondDiff: Lightweight, Robust, Semantically Guided Diffusion for Medical Image Segmentation
- 20243D MRI Synthesis with Slice-Based Latent Diffusion Models: Improving Tumor Segmentation Tasks in Data-Scarce Regimes
- 2023Treatment-aware Diffusion Probabilistic Model for Longitudinal MRI Generation and Diffuse Glioma Growth Prediction
- 2023MedSegDiff-V2: Diffusion based Medical Image Segmentation with Transformer
- 2023Diff-UNet: A Diffusion Embedded Network for Volumetric Segmentation
- 2025SegDT: A Diffusion Transformer-Based Segmentation Model for Medical Imaging