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AnatoDiff: Synthesizing Anatomically Truthful Radiographs With Limited Training Images

Yung, Ka-Wai; Sivaraj, Jayaram; Di Giura, Lodovico; Eaton, Simon; De Coppi, Paolo; Stoyanov, Danail; Loukogeorgakis, Stavros; (2026) AnatoDiff: Synthesizing Anatomically Truthful Radiographs With Limited Training Images. IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging 10.1109/tmi.2026.3661433. (In press). Green open access

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Abstract

Rapid advancements in diffusion models have enabled synthesis of realistic and anonymized imagery in radiography. However, due to their complexity, these models typically require large training volumes, often exceeding 10,000 images. Pre-training on natural images can partly mitigate this issue, but often fails to generate anatomically accurate shapes due to the significant domain gap. This prohibits applications in specialized medical conditions with limited data. We propose AnatoDiff, a diffusion model synthesizing high-quality X-Ray images with accurate anatomical shapes using only 500 to 1,000 training samples. AnatoDiff incorporates a Shape Prototype Module and Anatomical Fidelity loss, allowing for smaller training volumes through targeted supervision. We extensively validate AnatoDiff across three open-source datasets from distinct anatomical regions: Neonatal Abdomen (1,000 images); Adult Chest (500 images); and Humerus (500 images). Results demonstrate significant benefits, with an average improvement of 14.9% in Fréchet Inception Distance, 9.7% in Improved Precision, and 2.3% in Improved Recall compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) few-shot and data-limited natural image synthesis methods. Unlike other models, AnatoDiff consistently generates anatomically correct images with accurate shapes. Additionally, a ResNet-50 classifier trained on AnatoDiff-generated images shows a 2.1% to 5.3% increase in F1-score, compared to being trained on SOTA diffusion images, across 500 to 10,000 samples. A survey with 10 medical professionals reveals that images generated by AnatoDiff are challenging to distinguish from real ones, with a Matthews correlation coefficient of 0.277 and Fleiss’ Kappa of 0.126, highlighting the effectiveness of AnatoDiff in generating high-quality, anatomically accurate radiographs. Our code is available at https://github.com/KawaiYung/AnatoDiff.

Type: Article
Title: AnatoDiff: Synthesizing Anatomically Truthful Radiographs With Limited Training Images
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1109/tmi.2026.3661433
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1109/tmi.2026.3661433
Language: English
Additional information: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Keywords: Diffusion Models; X-Ray; Generative Modeling; Topological Data Analysis
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Population Health Sciences > UCL GOS Institute of Child Health
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Computer Science
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Med Phys and Biomedical Eng
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Population Health Sciences > UCL GOS Institute of Child Health > Developmental Biology and Cancer Dept
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10221305
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