MedEdit: Counterfactual Diffusion-based Image Editing on Brain MRI
This work addresses the challenge of realistic medical image editing for diseases like stroke, enabling more accurate counterfactual research and clinical tool development, though it is incremental as it builds on existing diffusion models.
The authors tackled the problem of generating realistic biomedical counterfactual images, such as stroke lesions, by proposing MedEdit, a conditional diffusion model that balances disease effects with scan integrity, outperforming state-of-the-art methods by 45-61% on metrics like Frechet Inception Distance and Dice scores.
Denoising diffusion probabilistic models enable high-fidelity image synthesis and editing. In biomedicine, these models facilitate counterfactual image editing, producing pairs of images where one is edited to simulate hypothetical conditions. For example, they can model the progression of specific diseases, such as stroke lesions. However, current image editing techniques often fail to generate realistic biomedical counterfactuals, either by inadequately modeling indirect pathological effects like brain atrophy or by excessively altering the scan, which disrupts correspondence to the original images. Here, we propose MedEdit, a conditional diffusion model for medical image editing. MedEdit induces pathology in specific areas while balancing the modeling of disease effects and preserving the integrity of the original scan. We evaluated MedEdit on the Atlas v2.0 stroke dataset using Frechet Inception Distance and Dice scores, outperforming state-of-the-art diffusion-based methods such as Palette (by 45%) and SDEdit (by 61%). Additionally, clinical evaluations by a board-certified neuroradiologist confirmed that MedEdit generated realistic stroke scans indistinguishable from real ones. We believe this work will enable counterfactual image editing research to further advance the development of realistic and clinically useful imaging tools.