Efficient Factorized Volume Synthesis with Lifted Inter-Slice Feature Trajectories

arXiv:2605.19060v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: High-resolution 3D medical image generation remains challenging because fully volumetric models are computationally expensive, while efficient 2D slice generators often fail to preserve anatomical consistency across the third dimension. We propose LiFT, a framework for Lifted inter-slice Feature Trajectories that factorizes 3D volume synthesis into per-slice image generation and inter-slice trajectory learning. Rather than using a fully volumetric synthesis backbone, LiFT treats a volume as an ordered trajectory in feature space, capturing how anatomical structures appear, transform, and disappear across depth. We demonstrate the LiFT framework in both unconditional and conditional settings. In unconditional generation, a tri-planar drifting loss matches feature distributions between generated and real volumes across three orthogonal planes; in paired translation, a bidirectional $z$-context mixer trained with paired target supervision supplies through-plane coherence while preserving per-slice fidelity. We evaluate LiFT on BraTS 2023 for unconditional and missing-modality MR synthesis, and on SynthRAD2023 for MR-to-CT translation. LiFT achieves competitive image quality while retaining the efficiency of predominantly 2D synthesis, operating up to $390\times$ faster than a volumetric diffusion baseline and consistently improving through-plane coherence through explicit inter-slice modeling. These results establish lightweight inter-slice trajectory learning as an efficient approach to high-resolution 3D medical synthesis.