MedPCFM: Improving Medical Point Cloud Completion by Integrating Point Transformers and Flow Matching
Authors: Kamil Kwarciak, Marek Wodzinski
Organizations: Department of Measurement and Electronics, AGH University of Krakow, Krakow, Poland · Sano Centre for Computational Medicine, Krakow, Poland
Medical point cloud completion is important for anatomical reconstruction and downstream clinical workflows, yet generative modeling in this setting remains insufficiently studied. We investigate completion through continuous-time generative modeling and introduce PCFM, a PTv3-backed flow matching approach for medical point cloud completion. We evaluate on SkullFix and SkullBreak, and additionally on the more recent Mandibular Defect dataset. We build strong baselines by adapting PTv3 to a deterministic encoder-decoder completion model and by instantiating diffusion completion (PCDiff) with both PVCNN and PTv3 denoisers. PCFM with PTv3 is competitive with the deterministic PTv3 baseline and achieves state-of-the-art generative performance across datasets, while requiring substantially fewer sampling steps than diffusion. At the best operating points, PTv3 also yields clear throughput gains, providing up to a 7× speed-up for PCFM compared to a PVCNN backbone. Finally, we study empirical scaling trends by varying model size and point cardinality, showing consistent gains with higher point resolution and informative trade-offs across model scales.
Point cloud completion commonly follows a coarse-to-fine paradigm, where a low-density coarse shape is first predicted and then upsampled to the target resolution. Although recent methods have improved global structure recovery, the fine stage often remains limited by simple upsampling and insufficient interaction with coarse structural features, making local detail reconstruction challenging. We propose SUMI, a diffusion-enhanced refinement module for coarse-to-fine point cloud completion. Unlike prior diffusion-based completion methods that use diffusion as a standalone point generator, SUMI injects noisy geometric features into cross-attention with coarse structural features, enabling reverse denoising to refine local geometry while preserving global consistency. SUMI can also be integrated into existing coarse-to-fine models as a flexible refinement module. Experiments on PCN, ShapeNet-55/34, and MVP demonstrate consistent improvements over strong baselines. SUMI achieves the best overall CD and F1-score on PCN, reduces CD by up to 16.1% on ShapeNet-55, and obtains the best CD across all output densities on MVP.
Point cloud completion aims to infer a complete 3D shape from a partial point cloud and serves as a fundamental building block for downstream tasks such as reconstruction, editing, and simulation. Despite the recent progress, existing learning-based methods often implicitly rely on access to the ground-truth shape scale (GT-scale) during both training- and testing-time normalization, assuming privileged information that is unavailable in real-world inference. This hidden assumption limits practical deployment and can lead to severe completion artifacts, e.g., over- or under-completion and nested shells, once the oracle GT-scale cue is removed. We observe that the recent foundation image generation models exhibit a strong capability of understanding objects and geometries, and producing multi-view consistent renderings, making them promising priors for GT-scale-free 3D completion. Motivated by this insight, we propose ScaleBlind, a novel framework that leverages foundation-model-based image completion to recover global scale directly from partial inputs and then faithfully produces the 3D completion. Specifically, ScaleBlind dreams out complete multi-view appearances from rendered partial views, lifts the inferred missing regions back into 3D to obtain a geometry-aware coarse completion, and further refines it via a powerful cross-modal fusion network with the original partial point cloud. By harnessing 2D foundation priors, our method eliminates the need for accessing GT-scale information at inference. Moreover, it provides a principled bridge between 2D generative priors and 3D point cloud completion. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our framework, making ScaleBlind the new state-of-the-art for the point cloud completion task.
Generating high-quality 3D point clouds requires capturing both global shape topology and local geometric details. Existing flow-based methods rely on continuous normalizing flows (CNFs) that demand expensive ODE solving and trace estimation during training, while diffusion models require hundreds of iterative denoising steps. Moreover, most approaches adopt single-level generation directly in point space, disregarding the hierarchical structure natural to 3D shapes. We propose Hierarchical Flow Matching (HFM) that extends flow matching to bilevel structure for unconditional 3D point cloud generation. HFM decomposes the task into two levels via optimal-transport flow matching: a \textit{Latent Flow Matching} models the global shape manifold in a compact latent space, and a \textit{Conditional Point Flow Matching} reconstructs detailed point clouds conditioned on the latent code. Both flows are trained with simple MSE regression losses. The resulting straight OT paths enable efficient sampling with as few as 15 Euler steps per flow, while the structured latent space supports downstream tasks including classification. Extensive experiments on ShapeNet and ModelNet benchmarks demonstrate that HFM achieves competitive or even best performance compared with prior state-of-the-art methods.