CIResDiff: A Clinically-Informed Residual Diffusion Model for Predicting Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis Progression

TL;DR

This paper introduces CIResDiff, a novel diffusion model that predicts IPF progression by generating follow-up CT scans from initial scans, integrating clinical knowledge and lung function data for early detection.

Contribution

The paper proposes a clinically-informed residual diffusion model tailored for IPF progression prediction, incorporating lung region alignment, lesion focus, and lung function data integration.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art methods in IPF progression prediction

Effectively generates follow-up CT scans from initial scans

Improves early detection of disease progression

Abstract

The progression of Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis (IPF) significantly correlates with higher patient mortality rates. Early detection of IPF progression is critical for initiating timely treatment, which can effectively slow down the advancement of the disease. However, the current clinical criteria define disease progression requiring two CT scans with a one-year interval, presenting a dilemma: a disease progression is identified only after the disease has already progressed. To this end, in this paper, we develop a novel diffusion model to accurately predict the progression of IPF by generating patient's follow-up CT scan from the initial CT scan. Specifically, from the clinical prior knowledge, we tailor improvements to the traditional diffusion model and propose a Clinically-Informed Residual Diffusion model, called CIResDiff. The key innovations of CIResDiff include 1) performing the target region pre-registration to align the lung regions of two CT scans at different time points for reducing the generation difficulty, 2) adopting the residual diffusion instead of traditional diffusion to enable the model focus more on differences (i.e., lesions) between the two CT scans rather than the largely identical anatomical content, and 3) designing the clinically-informed process based on CLIP technology to integrate lung function information which is highly relevant to diagnosis into the reverse process for assisting generation. Extensive experiments on clinical data demonstrate that our approach can outperform state-of-the-art methods and effectively predict the progression of IPF.