Benchmarking GANs, Diffusion Models, and Flow Matching for T1w-to-T2w MRI Translation

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Auteurs principaux: Moschetto, Andrea, Puglisi, Lemuel, Sargood, Alec, Dell'Acqua, Pierluigi, Guarnera, Francesco, Battiato, Sebastiano, Ravì, Daniele
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Moschetto, Andrea
Puglisi, Lemuel
Sargood, Alec
Dell'Acqua, Pierluigi
Guarnera, Francesco
Battiato, Sebastiano
Ravì, Daniele
author_facet Moschetto, Andrea
Puglisi, Lemuel
Sargood, Alec
Dell'Acqua, Pierluigi
Guarnera, Francesco
Battiato, Sebastiano
Ravì, Daniele
contents Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) enables the acquisition of multiple image contrasts, such as T1-weighted (T1w) and T2-weighted (T2w) scans, each offering distinct diagnostic insights. However, acquiring all desired modalities increases scan time and cost, motivating research into computational methods for cross-modal synthesis. To address this, recent approaches aim to synthesize missing MRI contrasts from those already acquired, reducing acquisition time while preserving diagnostic quality. Image-to-image (I2I) translation provides a promising framework for this task. In this paper, we present a comprehensive benchmark of generative models$\unicode{x2013}$specifically, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), diffusion models, and flow matching (FM) techniques$\unicode{x2013}$for T1w-to-T2w 2D MRI I2I translation. All frameworks are implemented with comparable settings and evaluated on three publicly available MRI datasets of healthy adults. Our quantitative and qualitative analyses show that the GAN-based Pix2Pix model outperforms diffusion and FM-based methods in terms of structural fidelity, image quality, and computational efficiency. Consistent with existing literature, these results suggest that flow-based models are prone to overfitting on small datasets and simpler tasks, and may require more data to match or surpass GAN performance. These findings offer practical guidance for deploying I2I translation techniques in real-world MRI workflows and highlight promising directions for future research in cross-modal medical image synthesis. Code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/AndreaMoschetto/medical-I2I-benchmark.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_14575
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Benchmarking GANs, Diffusion Models, and Flow Matching for T1w-to-T2w MRI Translation
Moschetto, Andrea
Puglisi, Lemuel
Sargood, Alec
Dell'Acqua, Pierluigi
Guarnera, Francesco
Battiato, Sebastiano
Ravì, Daniele
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) enables the acquisition of multiple image contrasts, such as T1-weighted (T1w) and T2-weighted (T2w) scans, each offering distinct diagnostic insights. However, acquiring all desired modalities increases scan time and cost, motivating research into computational methods for cross-modal synthesis. To address this, recent approaches aim to synthesize missing MRI contrasts from those already acquired, reducing acquisition time while preserving diagnostic quality. Image-to-image (I2I) translation provides a promising framework for this task. In this paper, we present a comprehensive benchmark of generative models$\unicode{x2013}$specifically, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), diffusion models, and flow matching (FM) techniques$\unicode{x2013}$for T1w-to-T2w 2D MRI I2I translation. All frameworks are implemented with comparable settings and evaluated on three publicly available MRI datasets of healthy adults. Our quantitative and qualitative analyses show that the GAN-based Pix2Pix model outperforms diffusion and FM-based methods in terms of structural fidelity, image quality, and computational efficiency. Consistent with existing literature, these results suggest that flow-based models are prone to overfitting on small datasets and simpler tasks, and may require more data to match or surpass GAN performance. These findings offer practical guidance for deploying I2I translation techniques in real-world MRI workflows and highlight promising directions for future research in cross-modal medical image synthesis. Code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/AndreaMoschetto/medical-I2I-benchmark.
title Benchmarking GANs, Diffusion Models, and Flow Matching for T1w-to-T2w MRI Translation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14575