Joint Holistic and Lesion Controllable Mammogram Synthesis via Gated Conditional Diffusion Model

TL;DR

The paper introduces Gated Conditional Diffusion Model (GCDM), a novel method for generating realistic, diverse mammogram images with controllable lesion features, aiding breast cancer screening data augmentation.

Contribution

GCDM is the first framework to jointly synthesize holistic mammograms and localized lesions with explicit control over lesion features and their anatomical context.

Findings

GCDM achieves precise lesion control in synthesized images.

Enhanced realism and diversity in generated mammograms.

Effective modeling of lesion and tissue relationships.

Abstract

Mammography is the most commonly used imaging modality for breast cancer screening, driving an increasing demand for deep-learning techniques to support large-scale analysis. However, the development of accurate and robust methods is often limited by insufficient data availability and a lack of diversity in lesion characteristics. While generative models offer a promising solution for data synthesis, current approaches often fail to adequately emphasize lesion-specific features and their relationships with surrounding tissues. In this paper, we propose Gated Conditional Diffusion Model (GCDM), a novel framework designed to jointly synthesize holistic mammogram images and localized lesions. GCDM is built upon a latent denoising diffusion framework, where the noised latent image is concatenated with a soft mask embedding that represents breast, lesion, and their transitional regions, ensuring anatomical coherence between them during the denoising process. To further emphasize lesion-specific features, GCDM incorporates a gated conditioning branch that guides the denoising process by dynamically selecting and fusing the most relevant radiomic and geometric properties of lesions, effectively capturing their interplay. Experimental results demonstrate that GCDM achieves precise control over small lesion areas while enhancing the realism and diversity of synthesized mammograms. These advancements position GCDM as a promising tool for clinical applications in mammogram synthesis. Our code is available at https://github.com/lixinHUST/Gated-Conditional-Diffusion-Model/