Kidney Cancer Detection Using 3D-Based Latent Diffusion Models
This work addresses annotation-efficient detection of kidney anomalies in medical imaging, though it is incremental as it builds on existing diffusion models.
The paper tackled kidney cancer detection from 3D CT scans using a latent diffusion model with weak supervision, achieving results that show promise but do not yet match supervised baselines.
In this work, we present a novel latent diffusion-based pipeline for 3D kidney anomaly detection on contrast-enhanced abdominal CT. The method combines Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs), Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models (DDIMs), and Vector-Quantized Generative Adversarial Networks (VQ-GANs). Unlike prior slice-wise approaches, our method operates directly on an image volume and leverages weak supervision with only case-level pseudo-labels. We benchmark our approach against state-of-the-art supervised segmentation and detection models. This study demonstrates the feasibility and promise of 3D latent diffusion for weakly supervised anomaly detection. While the current results do not yet match supervised baselines, they reveal key directions for improving reconstruction fidelity and lesion localization. Our findings provide an important step toward annotation-efficient, generative modeling of complex abdominal anatomy.