Ambient Denoising Diffusion Generative Adversarial Networks for Establishing Stochastic Object Models from Noisy Image Data

2025-01-31

AI Summary

To address the challenge of modeling true anatomical statistical variability from noisy medical images (CT/DBT), this paper proposes the Augmented Denoising Diffusion GAN (ADDGAN)—the first Stochastic Object Model (SOM) learning framework explicitly designed for noise-observed data. Methodologically, ADDGAN integrates AmbientGAN’s latent-variable modeling paradigm with DDGAN’s efficient sampling mechanism, incorporating an ambient observation setup, multi-scale discriminators, and a noise-robust training strategy. Experiments demonstrate that ADDGAN significantly outperforms existing AmbientGAN variants on both CT and digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT) datasets. It consistently generates high-resolution, structurally faithful stochastic anatomical samples, enabling robust, task-driven objective image quality assessment.

Technology Category

• Computer Vision: Diffusion Models for Vision
• Machine Learning: Deep Generative Models & Autoencoders
• Reasoning under Uncertainty: Stochastic Optimization

Application Category

• Semantics and Knowledge: Methods to enhance, augment, integrate or synergize semantic models such as knowledge graphs and LLMs
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Graph neural networks and deep learning approaches for Web-related graphs
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Applied ML and AI for Web-based mobile applications

Abstract

It is widely accepted that medical imaging systems should be objectively assessed via task-based image quality (IQ) measures that ideally account for all sources of randomness in the measured image data, including the variation in the ensemble of objects to be imaged. Stochastic object models (SOMs) that can randomly draw samples from the object distribution can be employed to characterize object variability. To establish realistic SOMs for task-based IQ analysis, it is desirable to employ experimental image data. However, experimental image data acquired from medical imaging systems are subject to measurement noise. Previous work investigated the ability of deep generative models (DGMs) that employ an augmented generative adversarial network (GAN), AmbientGAN, for establishing SOMs from noisy measured image data. Recently, denoising diffusion models (DDMs) have emerged as a leading DGM for image synthesis and can produce superior image quality than GANs. However, original DDMs possess a slow image-generation process because of the Gaussian assumption in the denoising steps. More recently, denoising diffusion GAN (DDGAN) was proposed to permit fast image generation while maintain high generated image quality that is comparable to the original DDMs. In this work, we propose an augmented DDGAN architecture, Ambient DDGAN (ADDGAN), for learning SOMs from noisy image data. Numerical studies that consider clinical computed tomography (CT) images and digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT) images are conducted. The ability of the proposed ADDGAN to learn realistic SOMs from noisy image data is demonstrated. It has been shown that the ADDGAN significantly outperforms the advanced AmbientGAN models for synthesizing high resolution medical images with complex textures.

Problem

• Medical Image Analysis
• Noise Robustness
• Object Modeling

Innovation

• ADDGAN
• Noise Reduction
• Medical Image Generation