Paired Diffusion: Generation of Related, Synthetic PET-CT-Segmentation Scans Using Linked Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models

The rapid advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in biomedical imaging and radiotherapy is hindered by the limited availability of large imaging data repositories. With recent research and improvements in denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPM), high quality synthetic medical scans are now possible. Despite this, there is currently no way of generating multiple related images, such as a corresponding ground truth which can be used to train models, so synthetic scans are often manually annotated before use. This research introduces a novel architecture that is able to generate multiple, related PET-CT-tumour mask pairs using paired networks and conditional encoders. Our approach includes innovative, time step-controlled mechanisms and a ‘noise-seeding’ strategy to improve DDPM sampling consistency. While our model requires a modified perceptual loss function to ensure accurate feature alignment we show generation of clearly aligned synthetic images and improvement in segmentation accuracy with generated images.