Towards Generalizable Tumor Synthesis

Qi Chen, Xiaoxi Chen, Haorui Song, Zhiwei Xiong, Alan Yuille, Chen Wei, Zongwei Zhou; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 11147-11158

Tumor synthesis enables the creation of artificial tumors in medical images facilitating the training of AI models for tumor detection and segmentation. However success in tumor synthesis hinges on creating visually realistic tumors that are generalizable across multiple organs and furthermore the resulting AI models being capable of detecting real tumors in images sourced from different domains (e.g. hospitals). This paper made a progressive stride toward generalizable tumor synthesis by leveraging a critical observation: early-stage tumors (< 2cm) tend to have similar imaging characteristics in computed tomography (CT) whether they originate in the liver pancreas or kidneys. We have ascertained that generative AI models e.g. Diffusion Models can create realistic tumors generalized to a range of organs even when trained on a limited number of tumor examples from only one organ. Moreover we have shown that AI models trained on these synthetic tumors can be generalized to detect and segment real tumors from CT volumes encompassing a broad spectrum of patient demographics imaging protocols and healthcare facilities.