Generative Modeling of Neurodegenerative Brain Anatomy with 4D Longitudinal Diffusion Model

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Jayakumar, Nivetha, Deb, Swakshar, Jafrasteh, Bahram, Zhao, Qingyu, Zhang, Miaomiao
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866910163236028416
author Jayakumar, Nivetha
Deb, Swakshar
Jafrasteh, Bahram
Zhao, Qingyu
Zhang, Miaomiao
author_facet Jayakumar, Nivetha
Deb, Swakshar
Jafrasteh, Bahram
Zhao, Qingyu
Zhang, Miaomiao
contents Understanding and predicting the progression of neurodegenerative diseases remains a major challenge in medical AI, with significant implications for early diagnosis, disease monitoring, and treatment planning. However, most available longitudinal neuroimaging datasets are temporally sparse with a few follow-up scans per subject. This scarcity of temporal data limits our ability to model and accurately capture the continuous anatomical changes related to disease progression in individual subjects. To address this problem, we propose a novel 4D (3DxT) diffusion-based generative framework that effectively models and synthesizes longitudinal brain anatomy over time, conditioned on available clinical variables such as health status, age, sex, and other relevant factors. Moreover, while most current approaches focus on manipulating image intensity or texture, our method explicitly learns the data distribution of topology-preserving spatiotemporal deformations to effectively capture the geometric changes of brain structures over time. This design enables the realistic generation of future anatomical states and the reconstruction of anatomically consistent disease trajectories, providing a more faithful representation of longitudinal brain changes. We validate our model through both synthetic sequence generation and downstream longitudinal disease classification, as well as brain segmentation. Experiments on two large-scale longitudinal neuroimage datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in generating anatomically accurate, temporally consistent, and clinically meaningful brain trajectories. Our code is available on Github.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_22700
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Generative Modeling of Neurodegenerative Brain Anatomy with 4D Longitudinal Diffusion Model
Jayakumar, Nivetha
Deb, Swakshar
Jafrasteh, Bahram
Zhao, Qingyu
Zhang, Miaomiao
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Understanding and predicting the progression of neurodegenerative diseases remains a major challenge in medical AI, with significant implications for early diagnosis, disease monitoring, and treatment planning. However, most available longitudinal neuroimaging datasets are temporally sparse with a few follow-up scans per subject. This scarcity of temporal data limits our ability to model and accurately capture the continuous anatomical changes related to disease progression in individual subjects. To address this problem, we propose a novel 4D (3DxT) diffusion-based generative framework that effectively models and synthesizes longitudinal brain anatomy over time, conditioned on available clinical variables such as health status, age, sex, and other relevant factors. Moreover, while most current approaches focus on manipulating image intensity or texture, our method explicitly learns the data distribution of topology-preserving spatiotemporal deformations to effectively capture the geometric changes of brain structures over time. This design enables the realistic generation of future anatomical states and the reconstruction of anatomically consistent disease trajectories, providing a more faithful representation of longitudinal brain changes. We validate our model through both synthetic sequence generation and downstream longitudinal disease classification, as well as brain segmentation. Experiments on two large-scale longitudinal neuroimage datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in generating anatomically accurate, temporally consistent, and clinically meaningful brain trajectories. Our code is available on Github.
title Generative Modeling of Neurodegenerative Brain Anatomy with 4D Longitudinal Diffusion Model
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.22700