The ASNR-MICCAI BraTS-Inpainting Challenge was established to mitigate dataset biases that limit deep learning models in the quantitative analysis of brain tumor MRI. This paper details our submission to the 2025 challenge, a novel deep learning framework for synthesizing healthy tissue in 3D scans. The core of our method is a U-Net architecture trained to inpaint synthetically corrupted regions, enhanced with a random masking augmentation strategy to improve generalization. Quantitative evaluation confirmed the efficacy of our approach, yielding an SSIM of 0.873$\pm$0.004, a PSNR of 24.996$\pm$4.694, and an MSE of 0.005$\pm$0.087 on the validation set. On the final online test set, our method achieved an SSIM of 0.919$\pm$0.088, a PSNR of 26.932$\pm$5.057, and an RMSE of 0.052$\pm$0.026. This performance secured first place in the BraTS-Inpainting 2025 challenge and surpassed the winning solutions from the 2023 and 2024 competitions on the official leaderboard.
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）
Inpainting has recently been proposed as a successful deep learning technique for unsupervised medical image model discovery. The masks used for inpainting are generally independent of the dataset and are not tailored to perform on different given classes of anatomy. In this work, we introduce a method for generating shape-aware masks for inpainting, which aims at learning the statistical shape prior. We hypothesize that although the variation of masks improves the generalizability of inpainting models, the shape of the masks should follow the topology of the organs of interest. Hence, we prop…
Numerous factors could lead to partial deteriorations of medical images. For example, metallic implants will lead to localized perturbations in MRI scans. This will affect further post-processing tasks such as attenuation correction in PET/MRI or radiation therapy planning. In this work, we propose the inpainting of medical images via Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). The proposed framework incorporates two patch-based discriminator networks with additional style and perceptual losses for the inpainting of missing information in realistically detailed and contextually consistent manner. …
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Wake Forest School of Medicine（维克森林医学院）
Although supervised learning has enabled high performance for image segmentation, it requires a large amount of labeled training data, which can be difficult to obtain in the medical imaging field. Self-supervised learning (SSL) methods involving pretext tasks have shown promise in overcoming this requirement by first pretraining models using unlabeled data. In this work, we evaluate the efficacy of two SSL methods (inpainting-based pretext tasks of context prediction and context restoration) for CT and MRI image segmentation in label-limited scenarios, and investigate the effect of implementa…
Local deformations in medical modalities are common phenomena due to a multitude of factors such as metallic implants or limited field of views in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Completion of the missing or distorted regions is of special interest for automatic image analysis frameworks to enhance post-processing tasks such as segmentation or classification. In this work, we propose a new generative framework for medical image inpainting, titled ipA-MedGAN. It bypasses the limitations of previous frameworks by enabling inpainting of arbitrary shaped regions without a prior localization of t…
Image inpainting has made significant advances in recent years. However, it is still challenging to recover corrupted images with both vivid textures and reasonable structures. Some specific methods only tackle regular textures while losing holistic structures due to the limited receptive fields of convolutional neural networks (CNNs). On the other hand, attention-based models can learn better long-range dependency for the structure recovery, but they are limited by the heavy computation for inference with large image sizes. To address these issues, we propose to leverage an additional structu…
Stavanger University Hospital（斯塔万格大学医院）；University of Stavanger（斯塔万格大学）
Masked Image Modelling (MIM) has been shown to be an efficient self-supervised learning (SSL) pre-training paradigm when paired with transformer architectures and in the presence of a large amount of unlabelled natural images. The combination of the difficulties in accessing and obtaining large amounts of labeled data and the availability of unlabelled data in the medical imaging domain makes MIM an interesting approach to advance deep learning (DL) applications based on 3D medical imaging data. Nevertheless, SSL and, in particular, MIM applications with medical imaging data are rather scarce …
University of Florida（佛罗里达大学）；National Institutes of Health Clinical Center（国立卫生研究院临床中心）
Deep neural networks have demonstrated very promising performance on accurate segmentation of challenging organs (e.g., pancreas) in abdominal CT and MRI scans. The current deep learning approaches conduct pancreas segmentation by processing sequences of 2D image slices independently through deep, dense per-pixel masking for each image, without explicitly enforcing spatial consistency constraint on segmentation of successive slices. We propose a new convolutional/recurrent neural network architecture to address the contextual learning and segmentation consistency problem. A deep convolutional …
Mask-Guided Multi-Channel SwinUNETR Framework for Robust MRI Classification
Departament de Matemàtiques i Informàtica, Universitat de Barcelona, Spain（巴塞罗那大学数学与计算机系）；Computer Vision Center, Bellaterra, Spain（贝尔特拉拉计算机视觉中心）；Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA), Passeig Lluís Companys 23, Barcelona, Spain（加泰罗尼亚高级研究与教育研究所）
A generalisable head MRI defacing pipeline: Evaluation on 2,566 meningioma scans
School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences, King’s College London（伦敦国王学院生物医学工程与成像科学学校）；Department of Neurosurgery, King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust（伦敦国王学院医院神经外科部门）
Rice University（莱斯大学）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are highly effective for image reconstruction problems. Typically, CNNs are trained on large amounts of training images. Recently, however, un-trained CNNs such as the Deep Image Prior and Deep Decoder have achieved excellent performance for image reconstruction problems such as denoising and inpainting, \emph{without using any training data}. Motivated by this development, we address the reconstruction problem arising in accelerated MRI with un-trained neural networks. We propose a highly optimized un-trained recovery approach based on a variation of the D…
Hierarchical Diffusion Framework for Pseudo-Healthy Brain MRI Inpainting with Enhanced 3D Consistency
The Grainger College of Engineering（格拉inger工程学院）；National Center for Supercomputing Applications（国家超级计算应用中心）；University of Illinois Urbana‑Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
Durham University（杜伦大学）；University of Exeter（埃克塞特大学）；County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust（达勒姆郡和达灵顿国民保健服务基金会信托）
Medical segmentation is performed to determine the bounds of regions of interest (ROI) prior to surgery. By allowing the study of growth, structure, and behaviour of the ROI in the planning phase, critical information can be obtained, increasing the likelihood of a successful operation. Usually, segmentations are performed manually or via machine learning methods trained on manual annotations. In contrast, this paper proposes a fully automatic, unsupervised inpainting-based brain tumour segmentation system for T1-weighted MRI. First, a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) is trained to rec…
BrainNormalizer: Anatomy-Informed Pseudo-Healthy Brain Reconstruction from Tumor MRI via Edge-Guided ControlNet
University of Pittsburgh（匹兹堡大学）；Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Cedars-Sinai Medical Center（西德萨斯医疗中心）；Mayo Clinic Arizona（梅奥诊所亚利桑那分部）
Self-supervised learning has shown great promise due to its capability to train deep learning MRI reconstruction methods without fully-sampled data. Current self-supervised learning methods for physics-guided reconstruction networks split acquired undersampled data into two disjoint sets, where one is used for data consistency (DC) in the unrolled network and the other to define the training loss. In this study, we propose an improved self-supervised learning strategy that more efficiently uses the acquired data to train a physics-guided reconstruction network without a database of fully-sampl…
Sparsity-Driven Parallel Imaging Consistency for Improved Self-Supervised MRI Reconstruction
Department of Electrical \& Computer Engineering, University of Minnesota, MN, USA Center for Magnetic Resonance Research, University of Minnesota, MN, USA
Semi-Supervised Bone Marrow Lesion Detection from Knee MRI Segmentation Using Mask Inpainting Models
Gordon Center for Medical Imaging, Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital（哈佛医学院与麻省总医院戈登医学成像中心）；Boston University（波士顿大学）；Seidenberg School of CSIS, Pace University（佩斯大学塞登伯格计算机科学与信息系统学院）；Ewha Womans University（梨花女子大学）
Advancing Brain Tumor Inpainting with Generative Models
Minzu University of China（中央民族大学）；School of Information Engineering（信息工程学院）；Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；School of Integrated Circuits and Electronics（集成电路与电子学院）
Facebook Artificial Intelligence（脸书人工智能）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）；Massachusetts General Hospital（麻省总医院）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）
Deformable registration of magnetic resonance images between patients with brain tumors and healthy subjects has been an important tool to specify tumor geometry through location alignment and facilitate pathological analysis. Since tumor region does not match with any ordinary brain tissue, it has been difficult to deformably register a patients brain to a normal one. Many patient images are associated with irregularly distributed lesions, resulting in further distortion of normal tissue structures and complicating registration's similarity measure. In this work, we follow a multi-step contex…
Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School（阿提诺拉A.马丁诺斯生物医学成像中心、麻省总医院和哈佛医学院）；Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital（麻省总医院神经科）；Hawkes Institute, University College London（霍克斯研究所、伦敦大学学院）；Danish Research Centre for Magnetic Resonance Department of Radiology and Nuclear Medicine, Copenhagen University Hospital – Amager and Hvidovre（丹麦磁共振研究中心放射科和核医学科、哥本哈根大学医院-阿马格和赫维多雷）；Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), Massachusetts Institute of Technology（计算机科学与人工智能实验室（CSAIL）、麻省理工学院）
NOVA: A Benchmark for Anomaly Localization and Clinical Reasoning in Brain MRI
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑技术大学）；Klinikum Rechts der Isar（莱比锡医院）；Helmholtz Center Munich（慕尼黑海德堡中心）；FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg（埃尔朗根-纽伦堡弗赖堡大学）；Imperial College London（伦敦帝国理工学院）；King’s College London（伦敦国王学院）
U2AD: Uncertainty-based Unsupervised Anomaly Detection Framework for Detecting T2 Hyperintensity in MRI Spinal Cord
School of Biomedical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学生物医学工程学院）；Renji Hospital, School of Medicine, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学医学院附属仁济医院）；Ruijin Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine（上海交通大学医学院附属瑞金医院）；National Engineering Research Center of Advanced Magnetic Resonance Technologies for Diagnosis and Therapy (NERC-AMRT)（先进磁共振诊疗技术国家工程研究中心）；Med-X Research Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学Med-X研究院）
Deep learning based image denoising methods have been recently popular due to their improved performance. Traditionally, these methods are trained in a supervised manner, requiring a set of noisy input and clean target image pairs. More recently, self-supervised approaches have been proposed to learn denoising from only noisy images. These methods assume that noise across pixels is statistically independent, and the underlying image pixels show spatial correlations across neighborhoods. These methods rely on a masking approach that divides the image pixels into two disjoint sets, where one is …
Reconstruct or Generate: Exploring the Spectrum of Generative Modeling for Cardiac MRI
School of Computation, Information and Technology（计算信息学院）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑技术大学）；Munich Center for Machine Learning（慕尼黑机器学习中心）；School of Medicine, Klinikum Rechts der Isar（医学院，莱茵河右岸医院）；Department of Quantitative Biomedicine（定量生物医学系）；University of Zurich（苏黎世大学）；Department of Computing（计算系）；Imperial College London（伦敦帝国理工学院）
Clinical Imaging Research Centre, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学杨潞龄医学院临床影像研究中心）；Savana Medica（萨瓦纳医疗公司）；Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, National University Hospital, National University Health System（新加坡国立大学卫生系统国立大学医院骨科）；Department of Surgery, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学杨潞龄医学院外科）；BioIonic Currents Electromagnetic Pulsing Systems Laboratory, BICEPS, National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学生物离子电流电磁脉冲系统实验室）
Objective: Medical image datasets with pixel-level labels tend to have a limited number of organ or tissue label classes annotated, even when the images have wide anatomical coverage. With supervised learning, multiple classifiers are usually needed given these partially annotated datasets. In this work, we propose a set of strategies to train one single classifier in segmenting all label classes that are heterogeneously annotated across multiple datasets without moving into semi-supervised learning. Methods: Masks were first created from each label image through a process we termed presence m…
Physics-guided deep learning (PG-DL) via algorithm unrolling has received significant interest for improved image reconstruction, including MRI applications. These methods unroll an iterative optimization algorithm into a series of regularizer and data consistency units. The unrolled networks are typically trained end-to-end using a supervised approach. Current supervised PG-DL approaches use all of the available sub-sampled measurements in their data consistency units. Thus, the network learns to fit the rest of the measurements. In this study, we propose to improve the performance and robust…
