AbdomenGen: Sequential Volume-Conditioned Diffusion Framework for Abdominal Anatomy Generation
Authors: Yubraj Bhandari, Lavsen Dahal, Paul Segars, Joseph Y. Lo
Organizations: Center for Virtual Imaging Trials, Dept. of Radiology, Duke University School of Medicine · Dept. of Physics, Trinity School of Arts and Sciences, Duke University · Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Pratt School of Engineering, Duke University
Computational phantoms are widely used in medical imaging research, yet current systems to generate controlled, clinically meaningful anatomical variations remain limited. We present AbdomenGen, a sequential volume-conditioned diffusion framework for controllable abdominal anatomy generation. We introduce the Volume Control Scalar (VCS), a standardized residual that decouples organ size from body habitus, enabling interpretable volume modulation. Organ masks are synthesized sequentially, conditioning on the body mask and previously generated structures to preserve global anatomical coherence while supporting independent, multi-organ control. Across 11 abdominal organs, the proposed framework achieves strong geometric fidelity (e.g., liver dice 0.83±0.05), stable single-organ calibration over [−3,+3] VCS, and disentangled multi-organ modulation. To showcase clinical utility with a hepatomegaly cohort selected from MERLIN, Wasserstein-based VCS selection reduces distributional distance of training data by 73.6% . These results demonstrate calibrated, distribution-aware anatomical generation suitable for controllable abdominal phantom construction and simulation studies.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Overview of AbdomenGen, sequential organ generation framework based on denoising diffusion U-Net with FiLM conditioning. For generation of organ oi (illustrated left to right for colon), the model pθi takes as input the body mask signed distance field (SDF) B , current context SDF Sictx , and volume control scalar vo . The scalar is injected through a FiLM adapter to modulate intermediate network features. The generated organ SDF S^oi is obtained and incorporated into the context to form Si+1ctx . Organs are generated in a predefined order (bottom), and the accumulated outputs form the final full abdominal anatomy.
Liver
Spleen
Kidneys
Stomach
(A) Fidelity: Generated vs Reference Masks
Dice ↑
0.83 ± 0.05
0.68 ± 0.13
0.60 ± 0.23
0.68 ± 0.15
ASSD (mm) ↓
5.85 ± 2.34
6.23 ± 2.83
6.16 ± 6.72
6.36 ± 4.16
HD95 (mm) ↓
17.58 ± 9.35
18.61 ± 9.05
16.05 ± 22.50
21.26 ± 17.76
Chamfer (mm) ↓
11.70 ± 4.68
12.47 ± 5.67
12.33 ± 13.44
12.71 ± 8.33
(B) Manifold realism: Generated vs Train-Nearest Neighbor
Table 1: (A) Geometric agreement between generated masks and reference mask (Gen vs Ref). (B) Manifold realism: distance from generated masks to their nearest training sample (Gen vs Train-NN). (C) Reference training variability: distance from reference masks to their nearest training sample (Ref vs Train-NN). Values are reported as mean ± std across 200 test cases.
Model
Pairwise Dice ↓
Pairwise Chamfer(mm) ↑
MAISI (size parameter=0.9)
0.803±0.057
13.97±4.31
Ours (Ref Masks VCS)
0.755 ± 0.096
17.01 ± 6.82
Table 2: Diversity comparison between AbdomenGen and MAISI. Values for generated liver distributions are reported as mean ± standard deviation.
Figure 2: Qualitative evaluation: Rows correspond to Liver (cyan, anteroposterior view) and Spleen (pink, posteroanterior view). Columns (left to right) show Reference Masks and VCS =−2 , 0, and +2 respectively. As VCS varies, target organ volume (below each rendering) exhibits controlled changes while surrounding anatomical structures remain spatially coherent.
Figure 3: (a) Mean organ volume change ( Δ %) relative to VCS = 0 across 200 test cases (mean ± 95% CI) as VCS is swept over [-3, 3]. Volumes are normalized to baseline generation to enable cross-organ comparison. (b) Kernel density estimates of liver volumes for the training cohort (dotted), Merlin hepatomegaly Reference Masks (solid), and generated samples under the selected volume-conditioning setting (dashed). Vertical dashed lines denote cohort means.
Figure 4: Joint liver–spleen volume distributions under independent VCS conditioning (±2). Gray contours denote the empirical training distribution; colored clusters show diverse but controlled generations that sampling these two dimensions.
Abdominal CT data are limited by high annotation costs and privacy constraints, which hinder the development of robust segmentation and diagnostic models. We present a Prior-Integrated Variation Modeling (PIVM) framework, a diffusion-based method for anatomically accurate CT image synthesis. Instead of generating full images from noise, PIVM predicts voxel-wise intensity variations relative to organ-specific intensity priors derived from segmentation labels. These priors and labels jointly guide the diffusion process, ensuring spatial alignment and realistic organ boundaries. Unlike latent-space diffusion models, our approach operates directly in image space while preserving the full Hounsfield Unit (HU) range, capturing fine anatomical textures without smoothing. Source code is available at https://github.com/BZNR3/PIVM.
Dinglun He, Baoming Zhang, Xu Wang +3
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, USA · Department of Computer Science, The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX, USA · Department of Radiation Oncology, Washington University in St. Louis, MO, USA +2
Generative models for volumetric medical images have found many applications in medical imaging, ranging from data augmentation to serving as priors for inverse problems. For these applications, generating high-resolution 3D images with strong controllability is essential but remains highly challenging. Existing approaches typically control generation either through radiology reports used as text prompts or through full image segmentation. While text-based prompting is flexible, it provides limited spatial control over the location, shape, and boundary of abnormalities. In contrast, segmentation-based methods receive precise spatial guidance but are restrictive in requiring full-organ annotations. In this work, we propose a flexible multimodal framework for controllable volumetric image generation that supports input from radiology reports and segmentation prompts (both optional). Our approach allows users to provide segmentation of a specific anatomy or abnormality without requiring full-organ annotations. The semantic meaning of the segmentation mask is specified through an accompanying text description, resulting in a highly flexible and scalable conditioning mechanism. We develop a memory-efficient architecture based on a modified diffusion transformer that jointly processes image and segmentation tokens. The model further incorporates gated attention to effectively attend to long radiology reports. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art perceptual and semantic scores (e.g., 24% relative improvement in mean FID), generates high-resolution anatomically consistent CT volumes, and improves data efficiency when used for data augmentation. Radiologists' evaluation further confirms strong alignment between generated and real medical images.
Weicheng Dai, Chenyu Wang, Binxu Li +4
Boston University School of Engineering, Boston, MA, USA · Stanford University · University of Pittsburgh Medical Center +1
Curating large labeled CT datasets is expensive and constrained by patient privacy. We present NV-Generate-BodyMask, a 3D latent diffusion model that synthesizes whole-body CT segmentation masks with precise, joint control over organ anatomy, tumor burden, and patient demographics. The model operates in the compressed latent space of a frozen mask autoencoder, generating 2563 volumetric label maps conditioned on a 19-dimensional vector via Adaptive Group Normalization and cross-attention. A size-adaptive ROI loss with spatial halo weighting and a paired tumor injection pipeline enable accurate tumor size conditioning despite the scarcity of annotated tumor cases. Trained on 8,571 masks across 26 cohorts spanning 132 labels, the model achieves Spearman ρ=0.70--0.92 for organ size, 85--100% tumor recall for lung, pancreatic, colon, and bone lesions, and strong demographic alignment (BMI ρ=0.78, sex-conditioned perfect prostate control).
Can Zhao, Pengfei Guo, Dong Yang +8
NVIDIA · National Institutes of Health · University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences