Cortical Surface Diffusion Generative Models
This work addresses the need for better methods to model brain development and variability in cortical surfaces for neurological and developmental disorder research, representing a domain-specific incremental advancement.
The paper tackled the problem of generating cortical surfaces for neuroimaging, which is challenging due to high individual variability and limited datasets, by proposing a novel diffusion model that uses modified surface vision transformers, resulting in superior performance in capturing intricate details and generating high-quality realistic samples conditioned on postmenstrual age.
Cortical surface analysis has gained increased prominence, given its potential implications for neurological and developmental disorders. Traditional vision diffusion models, while effective in generating natural images, present limitations in capturing intricate development patterns in neuroimaging due to limited datasets. This is particularly true for generating cortical surfaces where individual variability in cortical morphology is high, leading to an urgent need for better methods to model brain development and diverse variability inherent across different individuals. In this work, we proposed a novel diffusion model for the generation of cortical surface metrics, using modified surface vision transformers as the principal architecture. We validate our method in the developing Human Connectome Project (dHCP), the results suggest our model demonstrates superior performance in capturing the intricate details of evolving cortical surfaces. Furthermore, our model can generate high-quality realistic samples of cortical surfaces conditioned on postmenstrual age(PMA) at scan.