Brain Imaging Generation with Latent Diffusion Models

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the use of Latent Diffusion Models to generate high-quality synthetic 3D brain MRI images, enabling large-scale medical imaging research and data augmentation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel application of Latent Diffusion Models for high-resolution brain image synthesis conditioned on demographic and structural variables.

Findings

Generated realistic brain images

Controlled data generation via conditioning variables

Created and released a large synthetic dataset

Abstract

Deep neural networks have brought remarkable breakthroughs in medical image analysis. However, due to their data-hungry nature, the modest dataset sizes in medical imaging projects might be hindering their full potential. Generating synthetic data provides a promising alternative, allowing to complement training datasets and conducting medical image research at a larger scale. Diffusion models recently have caught the attention of the computer vision community by producing photorealistic synthetic images. In this study, we explore using Latent Diffusion Models to generate synthetic images from high-resolution 3D brain images. We used T1w MRI images from the UK Biobank dataset (N=31,740) to train our models to learn about the probabilistic distribution of brain images, conditioned on covariables, such as age, sex, and brain structure volumes. We found that our models created realistic data, and we could use the conditioning variables to control the data generation effectively. Besides that, we created a synthetic dataset with 100,000 brain images and made it openly available to the scientific community.