Longitudinal Lesion Inpainting in Brain MRI via 3D Region Aware Diffusion

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Hauptverfasser: Karimaghaloo, Zahra, Fetco, Dumitru, Assemlal, Haz-Edine, Rivaz, Hassan, Arnold, Douglas L.
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Karimaghaloo, Zahra
Fetco, Dumitru
Assemlal, Haz-Edine
Rivaz, Hassan
Arnold, Douglas L.
author_facet Karimaghaloo, Zahra
Fetco, Dumitru
Assemlal, Haz-Edine
Rivaz, Hassan
Arnold, Douglas L.
contents Accurate longitudinal analysis of brain MRI is often hindered by evolving lesions, which bias automated neuroimaging pipelines. While deep generative models have shown promise in inpainting these lesions, most existing methods operate cross-sectionally or lack 3D anatomical continuity. We present a novel pseudo-3D longitudinal inpainting framework based on Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPM). Our approach utilizes multi-channel conditioning to incorporate longitudinal context from distinct visits (t_1, t_2) and extends Region-Aware Diffusion (RAD) to the medical domain, focusing the generative process on pathological regions without altering surrounding healthy tissue. We evaluated our model against state-of-the-art baselines on longitudinal brain MRI from 93 patients. Our model significantly outperforms the leading baseline (FastSurfer-LIT) in terms of perceptual fidelity, reducing the Learned Perceptual Image Patch Similarity (LPIPS) distance from 0.07 to 0.03 while effectively eliminating inter-slice discontinuities. Furthermore, our model demonstrates high longitudinal stability with a Temporal Fidelity Index of 1.024, closely approaching the ideal value of 1.0 and substantially narrowing the gap compared to LIT's TFI of 1.22. Notably, the RAD mechanism provides a substantial gain in efficiency; our framework achieves an average processing time of 2.53 min per volume, representing approximately 10x speedup over the 24.30 min required by LIT. By leveraging longitudinal priors and region-specific denoising, our framework provides a highly reliable and efficient preprocessing step for the study of progressive neurodegenerative diseases. A derivative dataset consisting of 93 pre-processed scans used for testing will be available upon request after acceptance. Code will be released upon acceptance.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_05693
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Longitudinal Lesion Inpainting in Brain MRI via 3D Region Aware Diffusion
Karimaghaloo, Zahra
Fetco, Dumitru
Assemlal, Haz-Edine
Rivaz, Hassan
Arnold, Douglas L.
Image and Video Processing
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Accurate longitudinal analysis of brain MRI is often hindered by evolving lesions, which bias automated neuroimaging pipelines. While deep generative models have shown promise in inpainting these lesions, most existing methods operate cross-sectionally or lack 3D anatomical continuity. We present a novel pseudo-3D longitudinal inpainting framework based on Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPM). Our approach utilizes multi-channel conditioning to incorporate longitudinal context from distinct visits (t_1, t_2) and extends Region-Aware Diffusion (RAD) to the medical domain, focusing the generative process on pathological regions without altering surrounding healthy tissue. We evaluated our model against state-of-the-art baselines on longitudinal brain MRI from 93 patients. Our model significantly outperforms the leading baseline (FastSurfer-LIT) in terms of perceptual fidelity, reducing the Learned Perceptual Image Patch Similarity (LPIPS) distance from 0.07 to 0.03 while effectively eliminating inter-slice discontinuities. Furthermore, our model demonstrates high longitudinal stability with a Temporal Fidelity Index of 1.024, closely approaching the ideal value of 1.0 and substantially narrowing the gap compared to LIT's TFI of 1.22. Notably, the RAD mechanism provides a substantial gain in efficiency; our framework achieves an average processing time of 2.53 min per volume, representing approximately 10x speedup over the 24.30 min required by LIT. By leveraging longitudinal priors and region-specific denoising, our framework provides a highly reliable and efficient preprocessing step for the study of progressive neurodegenerative diseases. A derivative dataset consisting of 93 pre-processed scans used for testing will be available upon request after acceptance. Code will be released upon acceptance.
title Longitudinal Lesion Inpainting in Brain MRI via 3D Region Aware Diffusion
topic Image and Video Processing
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.05693