# Diffusion Bridge Networks Simulate Clinical-grade PET from MRI for Dementia Diagnostics

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15556 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.15556/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 70 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Oct 2025.

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

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03003/) (2022)
- [Elucidating the Design Space of Diffusion-Based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00364/) (2022)
- [BBDM: Image-to-image Translation with Brownian Bridge Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07680/) (2022)
- [Denoising Diffusion Bridge Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16948/) (2023)
- [ResViT: Residual vision transformers for multi-modal medical image synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.16031/) (2021)
- [SynthStrip: Skull-Stripping for Any Brain Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09974/) (2022)
- [DiT-3D: Exploring Plain Diffusion Transformers for 3D Shape Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01831/) (2023)
- [Let us Build Bridges: Understanding and Extending Diffusion Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.14699/) (2022)
- [Simulating Diffusion Bridges with Score Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07243/) (2021)
- [Combining 3D Image and Tabular Data via the Dynamic Affine Feature Map Transform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.05990/) (2021)
- [GANDALF: Generative Adversarial Networks with Discriminator-Adaptive Loss Fine-tuning for Alzheimer's Disease Diagnosis from MRI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.04396/) (2020)
- [PASTA: Pathology-Aware MRI to PET Cross-Modal Translation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16942/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Delta-Diffusion: Modeling Longitudinal Brain Amyloid-PET Trajectories via Conditional Poisson Diffusion Bridge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.22216/) (2026)
- [Bridging Modalities on the Cortex: Surface-based MRI to PET Translation with a Diffusion Bridge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.20147/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Positron emission tomography (PET) with 18F-Fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) is an established tool in the diagnostic workup of patients with suspected dementing disorders. However, compared to the routinely available magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), FDG-PET remains significantly less accessible and substantially more expensive. Here, we present SiM2P, a 3D diffusion bridge-based framework that learns a probabilistic mapping from MRI and auxiliary patient information to simulate FDG-PET images of diagnostic quality. In a blinded clinical reader study, two neuroradiologists and two nuclear medicine physicians rated the original MRI and SiM2P-simulated PET images of patients with Alzheimer's disease, behavioral-variant frontotemporal dementia, and cognitively healthy controls. SiM2P significantly improved the overall diagnostic accuracy of differentiating between three groups from 75.0% to 84.7% (p<0.05). Notably, the simulated PET images received higher diagnostic certainty ratings and achieved superior interrater agreement compared to the MRI images. Finally, we developed a practical workflow for local deployment of the SiM2P framework. It requires as few as 20 site-specific cases and only basic demographic information. This approach makes the established diagnostic benefits of FDG-PET imaging more accessible to patients with suspected dementing disorders, potentially improving early detection and differential diagnosis in resource-limited settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/Yiiitong/SiM2P.