# Pattern-Aware Diffusion Synthesis of fMRI/dMRI with Tissue and Microstructural Refinement

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04963 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.04963/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Self-Attention Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08318/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Medical Image Translation with Adversarial Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08208/) (2022)
- [DiffiT: Diffusion Vision Transformers for Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02139/) (2023)
- [Conditional Diffusion Models for Semantic 3D Brain MRI Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18453/) (2023)
- [CoLa-Diff: Conditional Latent Diffusion Model for Multi-Modal MRI Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14081/) (2023)
- [WDM: 3D Wavelet Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Medical Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19043/) (2024)
- [Make-A-Volume: Leveraging Latent Diffusion Models for Cross-Modality 3D Brain MRI Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10094/) (2023)
- [DiffusionGAN3D: Boosting Text-guided 3D Generation and Domain Adaptation by Combining 3D GANs and Diffusion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16837/) (2023)
- [Q-space Conditioned Translation Networks for Directional Synthesis of Diffusion Weighted Images from Multi-modal Structural MRI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13188/) (2021)
- [Synthetic Low-Field MRI Super-Resolution Via Nested U-Net Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15047/) (2022)
- [PET Synthesis via Self-supervised Adaptive Residual Estimation Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15550/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), especially functional MRI (fMRI) and diffusion MRI (dMRI), is essential for studying neurodegenerative diseases. However, missing modalities pose a major barrier to their clinical use. Although GAN- and diffusion model-based approaches have shown some promise in modality completion, they remain limited in fMRI-dMRI synthesis due to (1) significant BOLD vs. diffusion-weighted signal differences between fMRI and dMRI in time/gradient axis, and (2) inadequate integration of disease-related neuroanatomical patterns during generation. To address these challenges, we propose PDS, introducing two key innovations: (1) a pattern-aware dual-modal 3D diffusion framework for cross-modality learning, and (2) a tissue refinement network integrated with a efficient microstructure refinement to maintain structural fidelity and fine details. Evaluated on OASIS-3, ADNI, and in-house datasets, our method achieves state-of-the-art results, with PSNR/SSIM scores of 29.83 dB/90.84% for fMRI synthesis (+1.54 dB/+4.12% over baselines) and 30.00 dB/77.55% for dMRI synthesis (+1.02 dB/+2.2%). In clinical validation, the synthesized data show strong diagnostic performance, achieving 67.92%/66.02%/64.15% accuracy (NC vs. MCI vs. AD) in hybrid real-synthetic experiments. Code is available in hrefhttps://github.com/SXR3015/PDSPDS GitHub Repository