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).
Table 2: Diffusion UNet architecture and conditioning: v1 vs. v2. ✓= present.
Cohort
Cases
NLST
2,447
TCIA_Colon
1,141
StonyBrook-CT
1,103
AbdomenCT-1K
558
NSCLC_Radiogenomics
531
TotalSegmentatorV2
500
Table 3: Training cohorts (top 10 by size).
Tumor type
Crops
p10 (mL)
p50 (mL)
p90 (mL)
Lung tumor
63
1.3
5.2
55.6
Pancreatic tumor
281
1.7
5.8
18.9
Hepatic tumor
615
1.8
18.3
234.6
Colon cancer
126
6.1
21.6
71.9
Bone lesion
112
19.2
64.1
262.7
Table 4: Tumor library statistics.
Variable
N
Coverage
Mean
Std
Range
BMI (kg/m 2 )
1,020
11.9%
29.3
6.3
18–63
Weight (kg)
666
7.8%
73.4
17.1
22–144
Age (yr)
930
10.9%
64.1
12.0
19–87
Sex
1,988
23.2%
1,197 M (60.2%) / 791 F (39.8%)
Table 5: Demographic coverage in the training set (total 8,571 cases).
Figure 1: Body envelope construction on a case where three scanner table components account for 41% of the initial body volume. (a) Original CT axial slice. (b) Body mask before table removal: all three components incorrectly included. (c) Body mask after removal of all residual air-density regions inside the body.
Region
wrbase
Lung tumor
150
Pancreatic tumor
30
Colon cancer
30
Bone lesion
1.8
Hepatic tumor
2
Pancreas (organ)
3
Table 6: ROI loss base weights wrbase .
Figure 2: Organ size calibration curves (CFG ∈{0,1,2} ). Each subplot shows generated volume (mL) vs. requested conditioning quantile, with the real-data reference overlaid. Spearman ρ is reported per curve.
Organ
v1
v2
Liver
0.68
0.75
Spleen
0.49
0.80
Stomach
0.17
0.63
Pancreas
0.21
0.47
Left kidney
—
0.69
Right kidney
—
0.72
Table 7: Organ size calibration (Spearman ρ , CFG = 2). ↑ higher is better.
Recall ( q=0.1 )
Recall ( q=0.9 )
Size ρ
Tumor type
v1
v2
v1
v2
v1
v2
Lung tumor
54%
82%
86%
100%
0.23
0.76
Pancreatic tumor
54%
86%
44%
100%
0.01
0.56
Hepatic tumor
46%
42%
72%
80%
0.13
0.56
Colon cancer
58%
94%
76%
100%
− 0.03
0.56
Bone lesion
94%
100%
100%
100%
0.33
0.70
Table 8: Tumor recall and size calibration. ↑ higher is better. v1 uses CFG = 0 (no CFG); v2 uses CFG = 2.
Figure 3: Tumor recall (left) and size calibration (right) curves (CFG ∈{0,1,2} ). Left column: recall rate vs. requested conditioning quantile; GT is 100% at all quantiles. Right column: mean generated tumor size (mL) vs. quantile among present cases, with the GT reference overlaid. Spearman ρ is reported per curve.
Metric
CFG = 0
CFG = 2
BMI → body volume ( ρ )
0.73
0.78
Weight → body volume ( ρ )
0.85
0.81
Male prostate recall
100%
100%
Female prostate recall
0%
0%
Table 9: Demographic condition alignment. ↑ higher is better.
Figure 4: Organ and tumor size conditioning. Each panel shows coronal, sagittal, and axial views resampled to isotropic spacing; organs are color-coded by label. Within each column, all three samples share the same random seed — only the requested size quantile differs. Left column: Liver at q=0.2 (small), 0.5 (median), 0.8 (large); white contour highlights the liver. Right column: Bone lesion at q=0.2 , 0.5 , 0.8 ; white dashed circle marks the lesion centroid.
Figure 5: Demographic conditioning. Each panel shows coronal, sagittal, and axial views. Row 1: Sex conditioning — Male (prostate highlighted with white contour) vs. Female (no prostate generated). Row 2: BMI conditioning — lean (BMI = 18) vs. obese (BMI = 40), showing visibly different body cross-sections.
Controllable generative models of 3D medical images can synthesize volumes with specified clinical attributes, but this demands samples that are simultaneously high-fidelity, natively 3D, and faithful to the requested conditioning. We present CONFLUX, a latent diffusion model for chest computed tomography (CT): a 3D variational autoencoder compresses each volume, and a rectified-flow transformer generates in the latent space. Generation is conditioned on structured radiological metadata (18 abnormality findings, sex, age, and reconstruction kernel) through adaptive layer normalization. The model leads strong volumetric baselines on tri-planar Frechet distance (FID 32.3 vs. 74.6 for MAISI) while exposing direct control over clinical attributes. To strengthen that control we add an online reinforcement-learning post-training stage (group-relative policy optimization) that rewards how reliably a classifier recovers the requested findings from each generated volume. Judged by a separate, independent classifier, post-training removes 47% of the shortfall relative to real-scan reliability. We release the model and a ~200k synthetic chest-CT dataset with conditioning metadata spanning a wide variety of clinical findings.
Max Van Puyvelde, Halil Ibrahim Gulluk, Wim Van Criekinge +1
Department of Biomedical Data Science, Stanford University School of Medicine · Department of Mathematical Modelling, Statistics & Bioinformatics, Ghent University · Department of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University
Detection of rare lesions in whole-body CT is fundamentally limited by extreme class imbalance and low target-to-volume ratios, producing precision collapse despite high AUROC. Synthetic augmentation with diffusion models offers promise, yet pixel-space diffusion is computationally expensive, and existing mask-conditioned approaches lack controllable attribute-level regulation and paired supervision for accountable training. We introduce SALIENT, a mask-conditioned wavelet-domain diffusion framework that synthesizes paired lesion-masking volumes for controllable CT augmentation under long-tail regimes. Instead of denoising in pixel space, SALIENT performs structured diffusion over discrete wavelet coefficients, explicitly separating low-frequency brightness from high-frequency structural detail. Learnable frequency-aware objectives disentangle target and background attributes (structure, contrast, edge fidelity), enabling interpretable and stable optimization. A 3D VAE generates diverse volumetric lesion masks, and a semi-supervised teacher produces paired slice-level pseudo-labels for downstream mask-guided detection. SALIENT improves generative realism, as reflected by higher MS-SSIM (0.63 to 0.83) and lower FID (118.4 to 46.5). In a separate downstream evaluation, SALIENT-augmented training improves long-tail detection performance, yielding disproportionate AUPRC gains across low prevalences and target-to-volume ratios. Optimal synthetic ratios shift from 2x to 4x as labeled seed size decreases, indicating a seed-dependent augmentation regime under low-label conditions. SALIENT demonstrates that frequency-aware diffusion enables controllable, computationally efficient precision rescue in long-tail CT detection.
Yifan Li, Mehrdad Salimitari, Taiyu Zhang +2
Trauma Radiology AI Laboratory (TRAIL), Department of Radiology and Nuclear Medicine, University of Maryland School of Medicine · Department of Radiology and Nuclear Medicine, University of Maryland School of Medicine
Deep learning and generative models are advancing rapidly, with synthetic data increasingly being integrated into training pipelines for downstream analysis tasks. However, in medical imaging, their adoption remains constrained by the scarcity of reliable annotated datasets. To address this limitation, we propose 3D-LLDM, a label-guided 3D latent diffusion model that generates high-quality synthetic magnetic resonance (MR) volumes with corresponding anatomical segmentation masks. Our approach uses hepatobiliary phase MR images enhanced with the Gd-EOB-DTPA contrast agent to derive structural masks for the liver, portal vein, hepatic vein, and hepatocellular carcinoma, which then guide volumetric synthesis through a ControlNet-based architecture. Trained on 720 real clinical hepatobiliary phase MR scans from Samsung Medical Center, 3D-LLDM achieves a Fréchet Inception Distance (FID) of 28.31, improving over GANs by 70.9% and over state-of-the-art diffusion baselines by 26.7%. When used for data augmentation, the synthetic volumes improve hepatocellular carcinoma segmentation by up to 11.153% Dice score across five CNN architectures.
Kyeonghun Kim, Jaehyeok Bae, Youngung Han +10
OUTTA, Republic of Korea · Stanford University, USA · Seoul National University, Republic of Korea +6