MRecover: A Conditional Generative Model for Recovering Motion-Corrupted MR images Using AI Generated Contrast
Authors: Jinghang Li, Tales Santini, Courtney Clark, Bruno de Almeida, Cong Chu, Salem Alkhateeb, Andrea Sajewski, Jacob Berardinelli, +8 more
Organizations: Department of Bioengineering, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA · School of Medicine, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA · Department of Radiology, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA · Department of Psychiatry, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
Abstract
Hippocampal subfield segmentation requires high-resolution T2w turbo spin echo (TSE) MRI, yet this sequence is susceptible to motion artifacts, leading to substantial data loss. We developed a conditional generative model (MRecover) that synthesizes routinely acquired T1w images to create TSE images with autoregressive slice conditioning for volumetric consistency. Trained on 7T MRI data (n=577), the model achieved high in-domain fidelity (n=148, SSIM=0.84, FSIM=0.94) and generalized well to out-of-domain 3T data: subfield volumes from synthesized and the as-acquired images closely matched: (n=416, r=0.87-0.97) and yielded 31.8% more analyzable subjects in the motion-affected ADNI3 dataset after quality control (593 vs 450). The synthesized images also achieved larger effect sizes due to increasing the sample size for diagnostic group differences in hippocampal subfield atrophy (whole hippocampus ε2= 0.121-0.100 vs. 0.086-0.062, left-right hemispheres). Project page: https://jinghangli98.github.io/MRecover/
Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) acquired at different field strengths exhibits pronounced variation in noise, resolution, homogeneity, and contrast, which limits comparability across acquisition settings and complicates downstream analysis. We address this with a unified conditional model for controllable field-to-field synthesis, built on the framework of conditional latent bridge matching. Our single model achieves highly competitive results across the validation phase for all three tasks of the MRIxFields2026 challenge without task-specific architectures or training. We achieve fast generation with only a single inference step, producing all modality and field-strength combinations for 30 axial slices in under 90 seconds, as well as cross-modality-strength translation for a full volume in under 70 seconds, on a single NVIDIA A5000 GPU. We further provide extensive ablations regarding different components of our solution. Code: https://gitlab.com/siddharthsrivastava/mrixfields-2026
Multi-contrast magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) provides complementary information for clinical diagnosis. However, acquiring all MRI sequences is often time-consuming and costly. Recent generative models perform cross-contrast synthesis to address this issue by inferring absent contrasts from the available ones. Nevertheless, synthesizing 3D MRI presents significant challenges. Due to the massive volume sizes, operating directly in the pixel space is computationally prohibitive; therefore, a common approach is to first compress the 3D volumes into a latent space and subsequently train generative models in that space. We observe that existing compression architectures face several critical issues: they under-preserve long-range anatomical coherence, discard clinically meaningful semantics, and rely on optimization objectives that lead to over-smoothed reconstructions. Ultimately, these shortcomings compromise the performance of subsequent generative models. In this work, we propose a semantics-first latent modeling framework for 3D MRI reconstruction and cross-contrast synthesis. Specifically, we introduce a Latent Harmonization Encoder (LHE) to capture global anatomical dependencies, ensuring coherent volumetric representations. To mitigate semantic degradation during latent compression, we further design a Semantic Recovery Block (SRB) that injects high-level priors from a self-supervised semantic teacher, enhancing contrast-aware separability in the latent space. Additionally, we propose an Anatomy-aware Frequency Loss (AFL) to adaptively preserve diagnostically relevant high-frequency structures. Extensive experiments on two public multi-contrast MRI datasets demonstrate consistent improvements in reconstruction fidelity and cross-contrast synthesis quality. Our code is available at https://github.com/script-Yang/RSF.
Recent advances in generative machine learning models have significantly improved medical imaging, offering promising solutions for data augmentation, privacy preservation, and improved model generalization. However, synthesizing high-quality structural MRI data for Alzheimer's Disease (AD) remains challenging due to the subtle, region-specific, and progressive anatomical changes associated with neurodegeneration. In this paper, we extend the Med-DDPM conditional diffusion model -- originally designed for brain tumor synthesis -- to generate 3D structural MRIs specifically tailored to AD. We adopted Med-DDPM due to its established stability and structural fidelity compared to other generative models, which makes it particularly suitable for capturing the subtle anatomical changes characteristic of AD. Our approach conditions the diffusion process on anatomical segmentation masks derived from the ADNI dataset, incorporating key AD-relevant brain structures into the generation process. We systematically evaluate the quality and utility of the synthetic images by training segmentation models on real, synthetic, and hybrid (mixed) datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that segmentation models trained exclusively on synthetic data achieve comparable Dice scores (0.6532) to those trained on real data (0.6513), while exhibiting significantly enhanced recall. Notably, models trained on hybrid datasets (mixing real and synthetic images) outperform both real and synthetic-only baselines, achieving a Dice score of 0.7244. These findings underscore the successful use of conditional diffusion models for generating anatomically accurate, AD-specific synthetic MRIs, and highlight their potential for enhancing training data availability, improving diagnostic accuracy, and promoting research reproducibility in neuroimaging studies.
Muge Zhang, Muhammad Ali Khaliq, Jamal Alsakran +2