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. PolypSteer: Counterfactual Endoscopic Synthesis via Training-Free Activation Steering

    Mar 7, 2026Trong-Thang Pham, Loc Nguyen, Anh Nguyen +2Counterfactual Image GenerationMedical Image Synthesis

    University of Arkansas, Fayetteville AR, USA · University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK · University of Houston, Houston TX, USA

  2. Optimizing 3D Diffusion Models for Medical Imaging via Multi-Scale Reward Learning

    Mar 6, 2026Yueying Tian, Xudong Han, Meng Zhou +3Medical Image Synthesis3D Diffusion Models

    University of Sussex · University of Toronto

  3. Longitudinal NSCLC Treatment Progression via Multimodal Generative Models

    Mar 6, 2026Massimiliano Mantegna, Elena Mulero Ayllón, Alice Natalina Caragliano +10Medical Image SynthesisLongitudinal Medical Image Analysis

    Unit of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Systems, Department of Engineering, Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma, Italy · Multi-Specialist Clinical Institute for Orthopaedic Trauma Care (COT), Messina, Italy · Department of Diagnostics and Intervention, Radiation Physics, Biomedical Engineering, Umeå University, Sweden +4

  4. LAW & ORDER: Adaptive Spatial Weighting for Medical Diffusion and Segmentation

    Mar 5, 2026Anugunj Naman, Ayushman Singh, Gaibo Zhang +1Image SegmentationHealthcare

    Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA · Sesame AI, New York, USA · Department of Computer Science Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA +1

  5. Structure-Guided Histopathology Synthesis via Dual-LoRA Diffusion

    Mar 4, 2026Xuan Xu, Prateek PrasannaMedical Image SynthesisConditional Diffusion Models

    Stony Brook University

  6. Balancing Fidelity, Utility, and Privacy in Synthetic Cardiac MRI Generation: A Comparative Study

    Mar 4, 2026Madhura Edirisooriya, Dasuni Kawya, Ishan Kumarasinghe +5Medical Image SynthesisSynthetic Data Augmentation

    University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka · University of Maryland, College Park, USA · Tulane University School of Medicine, USA; Simula Research Laboratory, Norway +1

  7. Mask-Guided Attention Regulation for Anatomically Consistent Counterfactual CXR Synthesis

    Mar 4, 2026Zichun Zhang, Weizhi Nie, Honglin Guo +1Medical Image SynthesisDiffusion-Based Image Editing

    Tianjin University

  8. TumorFlow: Physics-Guided Longitudinal MRI Synthesis of Glioblastoma Growth

    Mar 4, 2026Valentin Biller, Niklas Bubeck, Lucas Zimmer +6Medical Image SynthesisSynthetic Data Generation

    Technical University of Munich (TUM), Germany · Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML) · Chair for AI in Healthcare and Medicine, TUM and TUM University Hospital, Munich, Germany +3

  9. AWDiff: An a trous wavelet diffusion model for lung ultrasound image synthesis

    Mar 3, 2026Maryam Heidari, Nantheera Anantrasirichai, Steven Walker +2Medical Image SynthesisSynthetic Data Augmentation

    University of Bristol, UK · Visual Information Lab, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK · Bristol Medical School, University of Bristol, UK +1

  10. DiffusionXRay: A Diffusion and GAN-Based Approach for Enhancing Digitally Reconstructed Chest Radiographs

    Mar 2, 2026Aryan Goyal, Ashish Mittal, Pranav Rao +2Image EnhancementMedical Image Synthesis

    Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India · Qure.ai, India

  11. A Diffusion-Driven Fine-Grained Nodule Synthesis Framework for Enhanced Lung Nodule Detection from Chest Radiographs

    Mar 2, 2026Aryan Goyal, Shreshtha Singh, Ashish Mittal +3Lung Nodule DetectionSynthetic Data Augmentation

    Qure.ai, India · Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay

  12. The Texture-Shape Dilemma: Boundary-Safe Synthetic Generation for 3D Medical Transformers

    Mar 1, 2026Jiaqi Tang, Weixuan Xu, Shu Zhang +2Synthetic Data AugmentationMedical Image Synthesis

    Peking University · Central South University · Deepwise Ltd.

  13. Solving a Nonlinear Blind Inverse Problem for Tagged MRI with Physics and Deep Generative Priors

    Mar 1, 2026Zhangxing Bian, Shuwen Wei, Samuel W. Remedios +4Image Inverse ProblemsImage Reconstruction

    Johns Hopkins University · Johns Hopkins School of Medicine

  14. RAFM: Retrieval-Augmented Flow Matching for Unpaired CBCT-to-CT Translation

    Feb 28, 2026Xianhao Zhou, Jianghao Wu, Lanfeng Zhong +4Medical Image SynthesisImage-to-Image Translation

    School of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China · Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC 3800, Australia · Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Shanghai, China

  15. An Interpretable Local Editing Model for Counterfactual Medical Image Generation

    Feb 28, 2026Hyungi Min, Taeseung You, Hangyeul Lee +2Image EditingMedical Image Synthesis

  16. SALIENT: Frequency-Aware Paired Diffusion for Controllable Long-Tail CT Detection

    Feb 26, 2026Yifan Li, Mehrdad Salimitari, Taiyu Zhang +2Medical Image AnalysisSynthetic Data Augmentation

    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

  17. Chain of Flow: ECG-Conditioned 4D Cardiac Cine Generation from Patient-Specific Anatomical Anchor

    Feb 26, 2026Haofan Wu, Nay Aung, Theodoros N. Arvanitis +3Medical Image SynthesisCardiac MRI

    School of Engineering, College of Engineering and Physical Sciences, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom · William Harvey Research Institute, NIHR Barts Biomedical Research Centre, Queen Mary University London, London, United Kingdom · Barts Heart Centre, St Bartholomew’s Hospital, Barts Health NHS Trust, London, United Kingdom +1

  18. SFL-Net: Source-Factorized Latent Representation Learning for Multi-Contrast MRI to Tau-PET Synthesis

    Feb 26, 2026Agamdeep S. Chopra, Caitlin Neher, Tianyi Ren +3Disentangled Representation LearningMultimodal Disentangled Representation Learning

    Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA · Department of Radiology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

  19. RelA-Diffusion: Relativistic Adversarial Diffusion for Multi-Tracer PET Synthesis from Multi-Sequence MRI

    Feb 24, 2026Minhui Yu, Yongheng Sun, David S. Lalush +3Medical Image SynthesisDiffusion Models

    Department of Radiology and Biomedical Research Imaging Center (BRIC), University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA. · Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA. · Department of Exercise and Sport Science, UNC-CH, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA.

  20. Efficient endometrial carcinoma screening via cross-modal synthesis and gradient distillation

    Feb 23, 2026Dongjing Shan, Yamei Luo, Jiqing Xuan +7Medical Image AnalysisOncology

    School of Medical Information and Engineering, Southwest Medical University, Luzhou 646000, Sichuan, China · School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, China · Department of Ultrasound, Affiliated Hospital of Southwest Medical University, Luzhou 646000, Sichuan, China +8

  21. Towards Personalized Multi-Modal MRI Synthesis across Heterogeneous Datasets

    Feb 23, 2026Yue Zhang, Zhizheng Zhuo, Siyao Xu +6Medical Image SynthesisMissing-Modality Learning

    School of Biomedical Engineering, Division of Life Sciences and Medicine, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui, 230026, China · Center for Medical Imaging, Robotics, Analytic Computing & Learning (MIRACLE), Suzhou Institute for Advanced Research, University of Science and Technology of China, Suzhou, Jiangsu, 215123, China · National Key Laboratory of Intelligent Collaborative Computing, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, 610097, China +6

  22. MRI Contrast Enhancement Kinetics World Model

    Feb 22, 2026Jindi Kong, Yuting He, Cong Xia +2Magnetic Resonance ImagingMedical Image Synthesis

    Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, USA · Jiangsu Cancer Hospital, Nanjing, Jiangsu, China · Southeast University, Nanjing, Jiangsu, China

  23. Exploiting Completeness Perception with Diffusion Transformer for Unified 3D MRI Synthesis

    Feb 20, 2026Junkai Liu, Nay Aung, Theodoros N. Arvanitis +3Medical Image Synthesis3D Medical Imaging

    School of Engineering, University of Birmingham, UK · William Harvey Research Institute, Queen Mary University London, UK · Barts Heart Centre, St Bartholomew’s Hospital, Barts Health NHS Trust, UK +1

  24. MeDUET: Disentangled Unified Pretraining for 3D Medical Image Synthesis and Analysis

    Feb 19, 2026Junkai Liu, Ling Shao, Le ZhangDisentangled Representation LearningSelf-Supervised Pre-Training

    School of Engineering, College of Engineering and Physical Sciences, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, England, United Kingdom · UCAS-Terminus AI Laboratory, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China

  25. Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation via a Self-Supervised Semantic Bridge

    Feb 18, 2026Jiaming Liu, Felix Petersen, Yunhe Gao +6Unpaired Image-to-Image TranslationDiffusion Models

    Stanford University · LLNL · Johns Hopkins University

  26. Scalable next-scale autoregression for medical image generation across anatomical regions

    Feb 16, 2026Zhicheng He, Yunpeng Zhao, Junde Wu +7Medical Imaging Foundation ModelsHealthcare

    National University of Singapore · University of Oxford · Zhejiang University +1

  27. A Generative AI Approach for Reducing Skin Tone Bias in Skin Cancer Classification

    Feb 16, 2026Areez Muhammed Shabu, Mohammad Samar Ansari, Asra AslamMedical Image AnalysisSynthetic Data Augmentation

    University of Sheffield, UK · University of Chester, UK

  28. ECGFlowCMR: Pretraining with ECG-Generated Cine CMR Helps Cardiac Disease Classification and Phenotype Prediction

    Jan 28, 2026Xiaocheng Fang, Zhengyao Ding, Guangkun Nie +9Synthetic Data PretrainingMedical Diagnosis

    State Key Laboratory of General Artificial Intelligence, Peking University · School of Intelligence Science and Technology, Peking University, Beijing, China · Polytechnic Institute of Zhejiang University, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China +4

  29. Anatomically Guided Latent Diffusion for Brain MRI Progression Modeling

    Jan 21, 2026Cheng Wan, Bahram Jafrasteh, Ehsan Adeli +2Latent Diffusion ModelsLongitudinal Medical Image Analysis

    Cornell University · Weill Cornell Medicine · Stanford University +1

  30. Controllable Diffusion-Based Lesion Inpainting for Scalable Histopathology Data Augmentation

    Jan 13, 2026Mohamad Koohi-Moghadam, Mohammad-Ali Nikouei Mahani, Rex K. H. Au-Yeung +6Computational PathologySynthetic Data Augmentation

    Department of Diagnostic Radiology, Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine, The University of Hong Kong, Pok Fu Lam, Hong Kong SAR, PR China · Department of Pathology, Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China · Department of Anatomical and Cellular Pathology, Prince of Wales Hospital, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China. +2