High-Fidelity Medical Shape Generation via Skeletal Latent Diffusion
Authors: Guoqing Zhang, Jingyun Yang, Siqi Chen, Anping Zhang, Yang Li
Organizations: Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University, Shenzhen, China · Pengcheng Laboratory, Shenzhen, China · School of AI, Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen)
Anatomy shape modeling is a fundamental problem in medical data analysis. However, the geometric complexity and topological variability of anatomical structures pose significant challenges to accurate anatomical shape generation. In this work, we propose a skeletal latent diffusion framework that explicitly incorporates structural priors for efficient and high-fidelity medical shape generation. We introduce a shape auto-encoder in which the encoder captures global geometric information through a differentiable skeletonization module and aggregates local surface features into shape latents, while the decoder predicts the corresponding implicit fields over sparsely sampled coordinates. New shapes are generated via a latent-space diffusion model, followed by neural implicit decoding and mesh extraction. To address the limited availability of medical shape data, we construct a large-scale dataset, MedSDF, comprising surface point clouds and corresponding signed distance fields across multiple anatomical categories. Extensive experiments on MedSDF and vessel datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior reconstruction and generation quality while maintaining a higher computational efficiency compared with existing approaches. Code is available at: https://github.com/wlsdzyzl/meshage.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1: A semantic overview of the proposed architecture. We first train a VAE where the encoder maps the input surface and online-computed skeleton to a latent point set, which serves as a shape signature for the decoder to predict SDF values at queried spatial coordinates. A diffusion model is then trained in the latent feature space. For shape synthesis, new latents are sampled via the reverse diffusion process and decoded into neural implicit fields, which are subsequently converted into 3D shapes.
Fig. 2: Left: differentiable skeletonization. Right: skeleton-guided coordinate sampling (right); only 10% voxels (green grids) near the skeletal points (blue dots) are sampled for SDF calculation during inference.
Fig. 3: Qualitative comparison of shape reconstruction on MedSDF dataset. From top to bottom, the rows correspond to samples of the bladder, brain, colon, right coronary artery (RCA), left coronary artery (LCA), duodenum, gallbladder, liver, pancreas, spleen, stomach, and trachea. GeM3D (S) and Ours (S) denotes the skeletal points computed by GeM3D and our method, respectively.
Fig. 4: Qualitative comparison of shape generation on MedSDF dataset. From top to bottom, the rows correspond to samples of the bladder, brain, colon, right coronary artery (RCA), left coronary artery (LCA), duodenum, gallbladder, liver, pancreas, spleen, stomach, and trachea. For each category and method, we generate 500 samples and display the two nearest neighbors of the reference point cloud.
Method
CD ( ↓ )
EMD ( ↓ )
HD ( ↓ )
F1 ( %,↑ )
PointNet++
3.811
1.849
2.045
85.97
DGCNN
3.681
1.793
2.104
87.29
PCT
5.577
3.875
3.029
67.98
Point-SSM
3.876
2.012
2.336
85.30
Diff-PCD
6.001
1.278
3.023
61.47
GeM3D
2.672
0.643
1.260
97.86
TABLE I: Shape reconstruction evaluation on the MedSDF dataset. CD is multiplied by 102 , EMD is multiplied by 10 , and HD is multiplied by 10 . The best results are denoted in Bold .
Metric
Diff-PCD
EDM-PCD
PVD
GeM3D
Ours
FID ( ↓ )
95.83
51.50
66.35
133.7
35.99
KID ( ↓ )
10.99
3.544
5.057
15.69
2.204
MMD-CD ( ↓ )
6.923
8.044
8.411
9.537
7.720
MMD-EMD ( ↓ )
0.941
1.002
1.049
1.095
0.930
COV-CD ( ↑ )
70.60
58.06
48.16
38.11
72.87
COV-EMD ( ↑ )
67.87
57.05
48.02
39.16
72.00
TABLE II: Category-conditioned shape generation evaluation on the MedSDF dataset. KID is multiplied by 10 , MMD-CD is multiplied by 102 , and MMD-EMD is multiplied by 10 . The best results are denoted in Bold . The second-best score is underlined .
Dataset
Method
Reconstruction
Generation
CD ( ↓ )
EMD ( ↓ )
HD ( ↓ )
F1 ( %,↑ )
FID ( ↓ )
KID ( ↓ )
MMD ( ↓ )
COV ( %,↑ )
1-NNA ( %,↓ )
CD
EMD
CD
EMD
CD
EMD
CoW
Diff-Vessel
4.907
1.041
2.502
71.79
23.08
1.422
4.978
0.733
67.27
52.72
91.17
91.35
Ours
1.796
0.321
0.840
99.78
18.28
0.725
5.197
0.749
81.82
80.00
88.64
89.36
ImageCAS
Diff-Vessel
5.810
1.364
3.485
65.42
34.26
1.804
8.471
1.130
59.50
54.50
84.14
82.14
Ours
1.314
0.272
0.428
99.98
24.18
1.432
7.377
0.975
76.00
66.50
64.85
64.28
TABLE III: Shape reconstruction and generation evaluation on two vessel datasets: CoW and ImageCAS. The best results are denoted in Bold .
Fig. 5: Qualitative comparison of tubular shape reconstruction and generation. The top two rows correspond to reconstruction results of input point clouds from CoW and ImageCAS datasets, while the bottom two rows display the neighbors of input point clouds among the generated shapes.
Dataset
Module
Reconstruction
Generation
DS
SC
LA
CD ( ↓ )
EMD ( ↓ )
HD ( ↓ )
F1 ( %,↑ )
FID ( ↓ )
KID ( ↓ )
MMD ( ↓ )
COV ( %,↑ )
1-NNA ( %,↓ )
CD
EMD
CD
EMD
CD
EMD
CoW
✗
✗
✗
4.102
0.822
1.847
80.39
34.77
4.106
5.249
0.741
81.82
80.00
92.61
91.89
✔
✗
✗
2.348
0.481
1.293
98.13
23.57
1.844
4.911
0.725
76.36
72.72
91.53
91.35
✔
✔
✗
2.277
0.487
1.222
98.23
22.63
1.472
4.988
0.734
76.36
74.54
91.89
90.99
✔
✔
✔
1.796
0.321
0.839
99.78
18.28
0.725
5.197
0.749
81.82
80.00
88.64
89.36
TABLE IV: Ablation study on the CoW, ImageCAS, and MedSDF dataset. The best results are denoted in Bold . Recommended settings are marked with grey.
Statistical shape modeling (SSM) is central to population level analysis of anatomical variability, yet most existing approaches rely on densely annotated segmentations and fixed latent representations. These requirements limit scalability and reduce flexibility when modeling complex anatomical variation. We introduce MorphoFlow, a sparse supervised generative shape modeling framework that learns compact probabilistic shape representations directly from sparse surface annotations. MorphoFlow integrates neural implicit shape representations with an autodecoder formulation and autoregressive normalizing flows to learn an expressive probabilistic density over the latent shape space. The neural implicit representation enables resolution-agnostic modeling of 3D anatomy, while the autodecoder formulation supports direct optimization of per-instance latent codes under sparse supervision. The autoregressive flow captures the distribution of latent anatomical variability providing a tractable, likelihood-based generative model of shapes. To promote compact and structured latent representations, we incorporate adaptive latent relevance weighting through sparsity-inducing priors, enabling the model to regulate the contribution of individual latent dimensions according to their relevance to the underlying anatomical variation while preserving generative expressivity. The resulting latent space supports uncertainty quantification and anatomically plausible shape synthesis without manual latent dimensionality tuning. Evaluation on publicly available lumbar vertebrae and femur datasets demonstrates accurate high-resolution reconstruction from sparse inputs and recovery of structured modes of anatomical variation consistent with population level trends.
Mokshagna Sai Teja Karanam, Tushar Kataria, Shireen Elhabian
Kahlert School of Computing, Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute, University of Utah, Utah, USA
Diffusion probabilistic models have demonstrated significant potential in generating high-quality, realistic medical images, providing a promising solution to the persistent challenge of data scarcity in the medical field. Nevertheless, producing 3D medical volumes with anatomically consistent structures under multimodal conditions remains a complex and unresolved problem. We introduce Sketch2CT, a multimodal diffusion framework for structure-aware 3D medical volume generation, jointly guided by a user-provided 2D sketch and a textual description that captures 3D geometric semantics. The framework initially generates 3D segmentation masks of the target organ from random noise, conditioned on both modalities. To effectively align and fuse these inputs, we propose two key modules that refine sketch features with localized textual cues and integrate global sketch-text representations. Built upon a capsule-attention backbone, these modules leverage the complementary strengths of sketches and text to produce anatomically accurate organ shapes. The synthesized segmentation masks subsequently guide a latent diffusion model for 3D CT volume synthesis, enabling realistic reconstruction of organ appearances that are consistent with user-defined sketches and descriptions. Extensive experiments on public CT datasets demonstrate that Sketch2CT achieves superior performance in generating multimodal medical volumes. Its controllable, low-cost generation pipeline enables principled, efficient augmentation of medical datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/adlsn/Sketch2CT.
High-fidelity 3D MRI synthesis requires both globally coherent anatomy and fine-grained voxel-level detail. Although latent diffusion makes volumetric generation tractable, its image autoencoder introduces a reconstruction bottleneck that can limit the fine detail recoverable in the final volume. We present VoxStruct3D, a voxel-space flow-matching framework that directly models full-resolution MRI volumes using a clean-data prediction objective. Its Volumetric Voxel Generator (VVG) combines factorized 3D patch embedding with overlapping upsampling, time-modulated residual refinement, and skip fusion, enabling neighboring tokens to jointly reconstruct shared voxel regions and suppress patch-boundary artifacts. To complement direct voxel-space modeling with an explicit anatomical prior, we further introduce a Structure-First, Image-Follows (SFIF) strategy. A frozen pretrained 3D medical encoder and a StructVAE extract compact structure tokens that preserve dominant anatomy, while a structure-leading schedule keeps their trajectory ahead of the image trajectory. Patch-Aligned RoPE spatially aligns the unequal token grids, and asymmetric attention enforces one-way guidance from structure to image. Experiments on pathological and healthy T1-weighted brain MRI datasets show that VoxStruct3D achieves the strongest overall performance across feature-distribution alignment, sample diversity, and perceptual quality, producing anatomically coherent and visually realistic volumes.
Fang Li, Yang Gao, Shihao Zou +5
State Key Laboratory of Virtual Reality Technology and Systems, Beihang University · Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences · Faculty of Computer Science and Control Engineering, Shenzhen University of Advanced Technology