Medical Image Synthesis

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Overview

Medical image synthesis studies how to create or transform images such as MRI, CT, PET, ultrasound, and pathology scans when scans are missing, costly, or scarce. GANs and VAEs, diffusion and flow-matching models, autoregressive generators, and neural representations are conditioned on anatomy, clinical text, masks, acquisition physics, or patient history to translate modalities, model disease progression, and generate training data. The work matters because synthetic images could reduce acquisition burdens, expand underrepresented datasets, and support tasks such as segmentation, diagnosis, and treatment planning. A central challenge is that visual fidelity does not guarantee preservation of lesions, patient-specific anatomy, or downstream clinical utility, while generalization, privacy, and computational cost also remain important concerns.

Latest papers

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312 papers29 papers in the last four weeks, down 33% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

  1. Accurate MRI-free PET Quantification and Reliability Assessment via CT-to-MRI Synthesis and Conformal Prediction

    Oct 29, 2026Jungwoo Seo, Seung Yun Choi, Kun Ho Lee +3Medical Image SynthesisPET/CT Imaging

    Seoul National University, Seoul, Republic of Korea · Yonsei University, Seoul, Republic of Korea

  2. EPC-RawDC: Equivariant Physics Constrained 3D Diffusion with Raw Data Consistency for CBCT to CT Image Synthesis

    Oct 29, 2026Alzahra Altalib, Chunhui Li, Alessandro PerelliMedical Image SynthesisCone-Beam CT

    Faculty of Science, Engineering and Business, University of Dundee, DD1 4HN, UK. · Faculty of Applied Medical Sciences, Jordan University of Science and Technology, Irbid, 21410, Jordan · School of Cardiovascular and Metabolic Health, University of Glasgow, G12 8TA (UK).

  3. MRI-to-CT Translation of Spinal Images via Anatomy-Guided Pseudo-Pairing and Adversarial Diffusion

    Oct 27, 2026Eduardo Nieto, Ibai Genua, Davide Scorza +1Medical Image SynthesisMedical Imaging

    Fundación Vicomtech, Basque Research and Technology Alliance (BRTA), Donostia - San Sebastián, Spain · R&D Department, Cyber Surgery, Donostia - San Sebastián, Spain · eHealth Group, Bioengineering Area, Biogipuzkoa Health Research Institute, Donostia - San Sebastián, Spain

  4. Domain-Adapted Latent Diffusion Models for CT-to-PET Image Translation

    Oct 26, 2026Yann Bourdé, Lea Bogensperger, Arnela Hadzic +1Medical Image SynthesisImage-to-Image Translation

    Department of Quantitative Biomedicine, University of Zurich · Institute for Medical Informatics, Statistics and Documentation, Medical University of Graz

  5. StaX-Net: Stackelberg Interleaved Asymmetric Network for Cross-Modality Medical Image Translation

    Oct 25, 2026Amin Golnari, Saeid SaneiImage-to-Image TranslationMedical Image Synthesis

    College of Engineering & Computer Science, VinUniversity, Hanoi, Vietnam · College of Health Science, VinUniversity, Hanoi, Vietnam · Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, King’s College London, UK

  6. L0-Norm-Based CycleGAN for Unpaired Brain CT-to-MR Synthesis

    Oct 23, 2026Yunxiao Zhang, Shouqiang Du, Zexian Xu +1Medical Image SynthesisUnpaired Image-to-Image Translation

    School of Mathematics and Statistics, Qingdao University, Qingdao, 266071, China. · The Affiliated Hospital of Qingdao University, Qingdao, 266003, China. · School of Stomatology, Qingdao University, Qingdao, 266003, China.

  7. Diffusion-Based Synthesis of Complete 3D Biparametric Prostate MRI

    Oct 22, 2026Claudia Giardina, Montse Pardàs, Verónica VilaplanaMedical Image SynthesisMagnetic Resonance Imaging

    Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain

  8. Pos4CHD: A Positive-Free Mask-Guided Counterfactual Synthesis Framework for Fetal Congenital Heart Defect Analysis

    Oct 22, 2026Wenjie Xuan, Yapeng Li, Hang Su +5Medical Image SynthesisSynthetic Anomaly Generation

  9. SciFusion: Physics-Guided Compositional Diffusion for Multimodal 3D Scientific Image Generation

    Oct 21, 2026Luoxi Wang, Alessio Quercia, Hanno Scharr +1Image GenerationMultimodal Diffusion Models

    Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA · Forschungszentrum Jülich, Jülich, Germany

  10. DGCM-SSFA: Dual-Granularity Cross-Modulation and Sparse Strip Frequency Attention for Efficient 3T-to-7T MRI Synthesis

    Oct 21, 2026Zhichun Fan, Zhiqiang Chen, Lanling Liu +2Medical Image SynthesisMagnetic Resonance Imaging

    School of Computer Science and Engineering, Huizhou University, Huizhou, China

  11. CAPS: Clinically-Verifiable Anatomy-Prioritized Synthesis for Missing MRI Imputation in Brain Tumor Segmentation

    Oct 20, 2026Cecilia Diana-Albelda, Arthur Longuefosse, Mario Rubén Paz Campos +2Medical Image SynthesisBrain Tumor Segmentation

    Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Department of Electronic Technology and Communications, Madrid, Spain · RIKEN Center for Integrative Medical Sciences, Medical Data Deep Learning Team, Tokyo, Japan · Hospital Universitario La Princesa, Diagnostic Radiology Department, Madrid, Spain

  12. 3D Diffusion Models for Medical Imaging

    Oct 19, 2026Frank-Peter Schilling, Daniel Barco, Philipp Denzel +13D Diffusion ModelsMedical Image Synthesis

    Centre for AI (CAI), Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW), Technikumstrasse 9, Winterthur, 8400, Zurich, Switzerland

  13. CaMeWM: A Causal Medical World Model for Generative Tumor Evolution and Treatment Planning

    Oct 17, 2026Huanlong Gao, Xuelei He, Fengjun Zhao +1Causal World ModelsCausal Counterfactual Generation

    School of Electronic Information, Northwest University, No. 1 Xuefu Avenue, Xi’an, 710127, China · Xi’an Key Lab of Radiomics and Intelligent Perception, Northwest University, No. 1 Xuefu Avenue, Xi’an, 710127, China

  14. NV-Generate-Body: 3D Latent Diffusion Model forControllable Anatomy, Tumor, and Demographic Body Mask Synthesis

    Oct 16, 2026Can Zhao, Pengfei Guo, Dong Yang +8Medical Image SynthesisConditional Generation

    NVIDIA · National Institutes of Health · University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences

  15. GliomaINK: A Tumor and Anatomy Conditioned Flow Matching Framework for 3D MRI Sequence Synthesis in Glioma Patients

    Oct 16, 2026Moinak Bhattacharya, Annie Singh, Mohammad Chaudhry +2Medical Image SynthesisBrain MRI

    Department of Radiology, Columbia University Irving Medical Center, NY, US · Atal Bihari Vajpayee Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, India · Department of Biomedical Informatics, Stony Brook University, NY, US

  16. TransNSNet: A Transformer-Enhanced Multi-Scale Adversarial Framework for CT-to-PET Image Synthesis

    Oct 16, 2026Shaojun Li, Xiaoyu Deng, Ikuo KeshiMedical Image SynthesisImage-to-Image Translation

    Fukui University of Technology, Fukui Campus, 3-6-1 Gakuen, Fukui City, Fukui Prefecture 910-8505, JAPAN · University of Fukui, Bunkyo Campus, 3-9-1 Bunkyo, Fukui City, Fukui Prefecture 910-8507, JAPAN

  17. UniField++: A Unified Agentic Framework with Loop Reasoning for MRI Field-Strength Enhancement

    Oct 16, 2026Yiyang Lin, Chenhui Wang, Tianliang Yao +5Magnetic Resonance ImagingMedical Image Synthesis

    Department of Electronic Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China · Institute of Science and Technology for Brain-inspired Intelligence, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China · Institute of Diagnostic Radiology, University Hospital Zurich, University of Zurich, Zurich 8091, Switzerland +2

  18. Mixture of Multi-Sequence Feature Difference for Contrast-Enhanced MRI Synthesis

    Oct 15, 2026Jonghun Kim, Junmo Kwon, Hyunjin ParkMedical Image SynthesisMagnetic Resonance Imaging

    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon, Korea

  19. Focus, Align, and Diffuse: Time-Series-Aware Keyframe Diffusion for Cardiac Dynamic Synthesis from Sparse Observations

    Oct 13, 2026Junkai Liu, Haofan Wu, Nay Aung +3Medical Image SynthesisVideo Diffusion Models

    School of Engineering, University of Birmingham · William Harvey Research Institute, Queen Mary University London · Division of Cardiology, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

  20. Regime-Aware Router Learning for Multi-Domain Medical Image Generation with Diffusion Experts

    Oct 12, 2026Yaoshuai Ma, Wei Yao, Yongxiang Liu +5Expert RoutingDiffusion-Based Image Generation

    Peng Cheng Laboratory, Shenzhen, China · Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China

  21. BigCell: Generating Gigapixel Whole-Slide Images

    Oct 9, 2026Srikar Yellapragada, Alexandros Graikos, Zilinghan Li +10Image GenerationMedical Image Synthesis

    Stony Brook University · Argonne National Laboratory · University of Chicago +2

  22. Healthy Counterfactual Generation via Diffusion Inpainting for Mammography Classification

    Oct 8, 2026Inês Cruchinho Garcia, Mariana Mourão, Francisco Maria Calisto +2Mammography Image ClassificationCounterfactual Data Augmentation

    Institute for Systems and Robotics, Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon, Portugal

  23. One Frame, Full Heartbeat: ECG-Free Cardiac Cine MRI Synthesis via Phase-Conditioned Flow Matching

    Oct 7, 2026Shiyi Wang, Ruochen Sun, Peirong Liu +2Medical Image SynthesisCardiac MRI

    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA · Gordon Center for Medical Imaging, Department of Radiology, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA · Center for Advanced Medical Computing and Analysis, Department of Radiology, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA

  24. Unified Multi-plane Autoregressive Diffusion for 3D Multi-contrast MRI Synthesis

    Oct 7, 2026Yejee Shin, Geonhui Son, Jinglu Wang +3Medical Image Synthesis3D Diffusion Models

    Yonsei University · Microsoft Research Asia · Korea Institute of Science and Technology

  25. One Frame, Full Heartbeat: ECG-Free 4D Cardiac Cine MRI Synthesis via Radial-Decomposed Flow Matching

    Oct 6, 2026Shiyi Wang, Ruochen Sun, Xiang Li +2Medical Image SynthesisCardiac MRI

    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA · Gordon Center for Medical Imaging, Department of Radiology, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA · Center for Advanced Medical Computing and Analysis, Department of Radiology, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA

  26. Zero-Shot Brain MRI Inpainting with 2.5D Unconditional Flow Priors

    Oct 6, 2026Arnela Hadzic, Franz Thaler, Simon Johannes Joham +1Image InpaintingMedical Image Synthesis

    Institute for Medical Informatics, Statistics and Documentation, Medical University of Graz, Graz, Austria

  27. Multitask Conditional Generative Adversarial Network Enables Automatic Whole Knee Cartilage and Menisci Segmentation and Reliable T1ρT_{1ρ} and T2T_2 Quantification Without High-Resolution Morphological Images

    Oct 5, 2026Ahmed Tahseen Minhaz, Richard Lartey, Zhiyuan Zhang +8Multi-Task LearningMagnetic Resonance Imaging

    Program of Advanced Musculoskeletal Imaging (PAMI), Cleveland Clinic · Department of Biomedical Engineering, Cleveland Clinic Research, Cleveland Clinic · Department of Mathematics, Case Western Reserve University +1

  28. Abdominal Ultrasound Simulation from Semantic Labels using Paired Label-to-Physics-Based Image Translation

    Oct 2, 2026Santiago Vitale, Duilio Deangeli, Ignacio Larrabide +1Medical Image SynthesisImage Generation

    National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), Godoy Cruz 2290, CABA, C1425FQB, Buenos Aires, Argentina. · Pladema, UNICEN, Pasaje Arroyo Seco, Tandil, 7000, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

  29. Uncertainty as a Proxy for Semantic Correctness in Diffusion-Based Medical Image Synthesis

    Oct 2, 2026Yuxuan Ou, Konstantinos Kamnitsas, OxAAA Study +3Medical Image SynthesisDiffusion-Based OOD Detection

    Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom · Nuffield Department of Surgical Sciences, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom

  30. Synthetic training for long-tail haemorrhagic lesion segmentation in data-scarce settings

    Oct 1, 2026Yuan Cao, Sumeet Dash, Antonia Zachariadis +3Synthetic Data AugmentationMedical Image Segmentation

    Department Artificial Intelligence in Biomedical Engineering (AIBE), Faculty of Engineering, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), Nürnberger Strasse 74, 91052 Erlangen, Germany · Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg, Medical Faculty, Department of Neurology, Leipziger Straße 44, 39120 Magdeburg, Germany · German Centre for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE), Leipziger Straße 44, 39120 Magdeburg, Germany +1