MUMINS: Metadata-conditioned Uncertainty-aware Medical Image Next-state Synthesis

Abstract:Forecasting anatomical changes such as tumor growth and neurodegeneration is a challenging generative vision task. Morphological evolution is subtle relative to static anatomy, highly patient-specific, and inherently stochastic. Existing methods struggle with several issues: deterministic networks ignore biological stochasticity, while standard diffusion models require computationally prohibitive multi-pass sampling to quantify uncertainty. We propose MUMINS (Metadata-conditioned Uncertainty-aware Medical Image Next-state Synthesis), an efficient diffusion framework that jointly diffuses a baseline scan and its follow-up residual, summed to synthesize the follow-up scan, while concurrently predicting a spatial uncertainty map, in a single reverse diffusion process. Conditioned on the time interval and relevant metadata, it preserves fine-grained anatomy by dynamically re-injecting the baseline as a soft anchor at every denoising step, and a negative-log-likelihood head learns the uncertainty map to explicitly flag error-prone regions. Designed without organ-specific heuristics, the same architecture is reused across anatomies via separate, dataset-specific retraining. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that dataset-specific retraining of MUMINS matches or outperforms dedicated, domain-specific state-of-the-art methods on lung CT (PNG) and brain MRI (OASIS-3). Project page: this https URL.

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

I.2.6; I.4.5; I.4.9; J.3

arXiv:2609.17169 [cs.CV]

(or arXiv:2609.17169v1 [cs.CV] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.17169 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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