# Robust 3D Brain MRI Inpainting with Random Masking Augmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20202 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20202/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 3 of its 7 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [The RSNA-ASNR-MICCAI BraTS 2021 Benchmark on Brain Tumor Segmentation and Radiogenomic Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02314/) (2021)
- [U-Net Based Healthy 3D Brain Tissue Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18126/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Now You Have My Healthy Attention: A U-DiT for Brain-MRI Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.27974/) (2026)
- [RARF: Region-Aware Rectified Flows for 3D Brain MRI Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.03956/) (2026)
- [Sharpening the Ensemble: An SSIM-Aligned Residual Refiner for Brain-MRI Inpainting Post-Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.03981/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The ASNR-MICCAI BraTS-Inpainting Challenge was established to mitigate dataset biases that limit deep learning models in the quantitative analysis of brain tumor MRI. This paper details our submission to the 2025 challenge, a novel deep learning framework for synthesizing healthy tissue in 3D scans. The core of our method is a U-Net architecture trained to inpaint synthetically corrupted regions, enhanced with a random masking augmentation strategy to improve generalization. Quantitative evaluation confirmed the efficacy of our approach, yielding an SSIM of 0.873±0.004, a PSNR of 24.996±4.694, and an MSE of 0.005±0.087 on the validation set. On the final online test set, our method achieved an SSIM of 0.919±0.088, a PSNR of 26.932±5.057, and an RMSE of 0.052±0.026. This performance secured first place in the BraTS-Inpainting 2025 challenge and surpassed the winning solutions from the 2023 and 2024 competitions on the official leaderboard.