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Beware of diffusion models for synthesizing medical images - A comparison with GANs in terms of memorizing brain MRI and chest x-ray images
Linköping University, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Division of Biomedical Engineering. Linköping University, Faculty of Science & Engineering. Linköping University, Center for Medical Image Science and Visualization (CMIV). Clinical Memory Research Unit, Department of Clinical Sciences, Malmö, Lund University, Sweden.ORCID iD: 0000-0002-3248-5132
Linköping University, Department of Computer and Information Science, The Division of Statistics and Machine Learning. Linköping University, Faculty of Science & Engineering.
Linköping University, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Division of Biomedical Engineering. Linköping University, Faculty of Science & Engineering. Linköping University, Center for Medical Image Science and Visualization (CMIV). Linköping University, Department of Computer and Information Science, The Division of Statistics and Machine Learning.ORCID iD: 0000-0001-7061-7995
2025 (English)In: Machine Learning: Science and Technology, E-ISSN 2632-2153Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

Diffusion models were initially developed for text-to-image generation and are now being utilized to generate high quality synthetic images. Preceded by GANs, diffusion models have shown impressive results using various evaluation metrics. However, commonly used metrics such as FID and IS are not suitable for determining whether diffusion models are simply reproducing the training images. Here we train StyleGAN and a diffusion model, using  BRATS20, BRATS21 and a chest x-ray pneumonia dataset, to synthesize brain MRI and chest x-ray images, and measure the correlation between the synthetic images and all training images. Our results show that diffusion models are more likely to memorize the training images, compared to StyleGAN, especially for small datasets and when using 2D slices from 3D volumes. Researchers should be careful when using diffusion models (and to some extent GANs) for medical imaging, if the final goal is to share the synthetic images. 

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2025.
Keywords [en]
Synthetic images, GANs, diffusion models, memorization
National Category
Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Medical Imaging Probability Theory and Statistics
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-210499DOI: 10.1088/2632-2153/ad9a3aISI: 001408876900001Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85217039477OAI: oai:DiVA.org:liu-210499DiVA, id: diva2:1921519
Funder
Åke Wiberg Foundation, M22-0088Vinnova, 2021-01954
Note

Funding Agencies|ITEA/VINNOVA project ASSIST [2021-01954]; LiU Cancer and the akeWiberg foundation

Available from: 2024-12-16 Created: 2024-12-16 Last updated: 2025-03-03

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Akbar, Muhammad UsmanEklund, Anders

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Akbar, Muhammad UsmanEklund, Anders
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Machine Learning: Science and Technology
Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Medical ImagingProbability Theory and Statistics

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CiteExportLink to record
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