LAND: Lung and Nodule Diffusion for 3D Chest CT Synthesis with Anatomical Guidance
This provides a tool for generating diverse CT volumes with controlled anatomical features, aiding in training AI models or healthcare professionals, but it is incremental as it builds on existing diffusion methods for medical imaging.
The paper tackled the problem of generating high-quality 3D chest CT scans by introducing a latent diffusion model conditioned on anatomical masks, achieving synthesis of 256x256x256 volumes at 1 mm resolution with reduced computational cost on a single mid-range GPU.
This work introduces a new latent diffusion model to generate high-quality 3D chest CT scans conditioned on 3D anatomical masks. The method synthesizes volumetric images of size 256x256x256 at 1 mm isotropic resolution using a single mid-range GPU, significantly lowering the computational cost compared to existing approaches. The conditioning masks delineate lung and nodule regions, enabling precise control over the output anatomical features. Experimental results demonstrate that conditioning solely on nodule masks leads to anatomically incorrect outputs, highlighting the importance of incorporating global lung structure for accurate conditional synthesis. The proposed approach supports the generation of diverse CT volumes with and without lung nodules of varying attributes, providing a valuable tool for training AI models or healthcare professionals.