Tumor Synthesis conditioned on Radiomics

Abstract: Due to privacy concerns, obtaining large datasets is challenging in medical image analysis, especially with 3D modalities like Computed Tomography (CT) and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). Existing generative models, developed to address this issue, often face limitations in output diversity and thus cannot accurately represent 3D medical images. We propose a tumor-generation model that utilizes radiomics features as generative conditions. Radiomics features are high-dimensional handcrafted semantic features that are biologically well-grounded and thus are good candidates for conditioning. Our model employs a GAN-based model to generate tumor masks and a diffusion-based approach to generate tumor texture conditioned on radiomics features. Our method allows the user to generate tumor images according to user-specified radiomics features such as size, shape, and texture at an arbitrary location. This enables the physicians to easily visualize tumor images to better understand tumors according to changing radiomics features. Our approach allows for the removal, manipulation, and repositioning of tumors, generating various tumor types in different scenarios. The model has been tested on tumors in four different organs (kidney, lung, breast, and brain) across CT and MRI. The synthesized images are shown to effectively aid in training for downstream tasks and their authenticity was also evaluated through expert evaluations. Our method has potential usage in treatment planning with diverse synthesized tumors.