# Plasticine: A Traceable Diffusion Model for Medical Image Translation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18455 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.18455/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Medical imaging and segmentation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 40 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Dec 2025.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Medical imaging and segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/medical-imaging-and-segmentation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [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)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Group Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08494/) (2018)
- [Image Super-Resolution via Iterative Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07636/) (2021)
- [Spatial Transformer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02025/) (2015)
- [Palette: Image-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05826/) (2021)
- [StarGAN v2: Diverse Image Synthesis for Multiple Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01865/) (2019)
- [StarGAN: Unified Generative Adversarial Networks for Multi-Domain Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09020/) (2017)
- [Sigmoid-Weighted Linear Units for Neural Network Function Approximation in Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.03118/) (2017)
- [Multimodal Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04732/) (2018)
- [WaveGrad: Estimating Gradients for Waveform Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.00713/) (2020)
- [DualGAN: Unsupervised Dual Learning for Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02510/) (2017)
- [Learning to Discover Cross-Domain Relations with Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05192/) (2017)
- [Simple Does It: Weakly Supervised Instance and Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.07485/) (2016)
- [Deep Generative Image Models using a Laplacian Pyramid of Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.05751/) (2015)
- [Dual Diffusion Implicit Bridges for Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08382/) (2022)
- [EGSDE: Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation via Energy-Guided Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06635/) (2022)
- [Synergistic Image and Feature Adaptation: Towards Cross-Modality Domain Adaptation for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08211/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Learning for Fast Probabilistic Diffeomorphic Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04605/) (2018)
- [Fast Symmetric Diffeomorphic Image Registration with Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.09514/) (2020)
- [Translating and Segmenting Multimodal Medical Volumes with Cycle- and Shape-Consistency Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.09655/) (2018)
- [Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation via Neural Schr"odinger Bridge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15086/) (2023)
- [Breaking the Dilemma of Medical Image-to-image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06465/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Multi-Modal Image Registration via Geometry Preserving Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08073/) (2020)
- [DiffuseMorph: Unsupervised Deformable Image Registration Using Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05149/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Domain gaps arising from variations in imaging devices and population distributions pose significant challenges for machine learning in medical image analysis. Existing image-to-image translation methods primarily aim to learn mappings between domains, often generating diverse synthetic data with variations in anatomical scale and shape, but they usually overlook spatial correspondence during the translation process. For clinical applications, traceability, defined as the ability to provide pixel-level correspondences between original and translated images, is equally important. This property enhances clinical interpretability but has been largely overlooked in previous approaches. To address this gap, we propose Plasticine, which is, to the best of our knowledge, the first end-to-end image-to-image translation framework explicitly designed with traceability as a core objective. Our method combines intensity translation and spatial transformation within a denoising diffusion framework. This design enables the generation of synthetic images with interpretable intensity transitions and spatially coherent deformations, supporting pixel-wise traceability throughout the translation process.