mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Contrast-X: A Multi-Modal Contrast Image Synthesis Benchmark and Universal Modality Flow Matching

arXiv 2601.15884 ↗First posted 22 Jan 2026cs.CVcited by 2

On the map: Diffusion models → Medical imaging and segmentation

Abstract (arXiv)

Contrast-enhanced imaging is central to oncologic diagnosis, but contrast agents can be contraindicated for many of the patients who need them most. Synthesizing contrast scans from non-contrast inputs is the natural response. Two obstacles stand in the way: no benchmark provides paired contrast data with lesion-level evaluation, and no single model handles the arbitrary missing patterns seen in practice. We introduce Contrast-X, a benchmark of paired contrast-enhanced and non-contrast imaging spanning 10 organs in CT (1{,}526 patients) and multi-phase breast DCE-MRI (1116 patients). Every case carries radiologist-verified phase labels and tumor masks. We further propose FlowMI, a single model that handles arbitrary subsets of available modalities through a unified multi-modal latent space and flow matching. We benchmark a range of missing-modality configurations, reporting standard image-quality metrics, radiologist reader studies, and downstream lesion analysis on the synthesized scans. We further evaluate cross-organ generalization to test whether the model has learned a transferable contrast-enhancement operation. Dataset, code, and leaderboard will be released. Our code are available at https://github.com/YifanChen02/Contrast-X.

Key facts. Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Medical imaging and segmentation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models. Builds on 21 of its 44 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 22 Jan 2026.

Builds on

21 of 44 references.

Closest ancestors · 2

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025Learning Patient-Specific Disease Dynamics with Latent Flow Matching for Longitudinal Imaging Generation9 Dec
  2. 2024Self-Consistent Recursive Diffusion Bridge for Medical Image Translation10 May

Other references · 19

  1. 2021High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Modelscited by 18,863
  2. 2022Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformerscited by 6,054
  3. 2022Flow Matching for Generative Modelingcited by 5,702
  4. 2016Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networkscited by 4,527
  5. 2022Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flowcited by 3,700
  6. 2021Palette: Image-to-Image Diffusion Modelscited by 1,300
  7. 2022AMOS: A Large-Scale Abdominal Multi-Organ Benchmark for Versatile Medical Image Segmentationcited by 351
  8. 2018Multimodal Generative Models for Scalable Weakly-Supervised Learningcited by 200
  9. 2021ResViT: Residual vision transformers for multi-modal medical image synthesiscited by 177
  10. 2023Flow Matching in Latent Spacecited by 160
  11. 2016Multivariate mixture model for myocardium segmentation combining multi-source imagescited by 133
  12. 2020Hi-Net: Hybrid-fusion Network for Multi-modal MR Image Synthesiscited by 86
7 more
  1. 2024The 2024 Brain Tumor Segmentation (BraTS) Challenge: Glioma Segmentation on Post-treatment MRIcited by 69
  2. 2022CrossMoDA 2021 challenge: Benchmark of Cross-Modality Domain Adaptation techniques for Vestibular Schwannoma and Cochlea Segmentationcited by 58
  3. 2023SynthRAD2023 Grand Challenge dataset: generating synthetic CT for radiotherapycited by 53
  4. 2025LBM: Latent Bridge Matching for Fast Image-to-Image Translationcited by 36
  5. 2024Posterior-Mean Rectified Flow: Towards Minimum MSE Photo-Realistic Image Restorationcited by 34
  6. 2024I2I-Mamba: Multi-modal medical image synthesis via selective state space modelingcited by 26
  7. 2023The Brain Tumor Segmentation (BraTS) Challenge 2023: Brain MR Image Synthesis for Tumor Segmentation (BraSyn)cited by 24

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.

2 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026MAMA-FLUX.2: Image-to-Image Synthesis of Post-Contrast Breast DCE-MRI for the MAMA-SYNTH Challenge
  2. 2025Comparing Conditional Diffusion Models for Synthesizing Contrast-Enhanced Breast MRI from Pre-Contrast Images
  3. 2024Towards Learning Contrast Kinetics with Multi-Condition Latent Diffusion Models
  4. 2026Posterior Samplings are Missing Modalities Generators for Medical Image Translation
  5. 2026Anguinus Sculpturae: Compositional Synthesis of Peak-Enhancement Breast DCE-MRI Scans
  6. 2025Synthesizing Accurate and Realistic T1-weighted Contrast-Enhanced MR Images using Posterior-Mean Rectified Flow
  7. 2026Uncertainty as a Proxy for Semantic Correctness in Diffusion-Based Medical Image Synthesis
  8. 2026Pre- to Post-Contrast Synthesis of Breast DCE-MRI using Latent Bridge Matching