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arxiv: 2605.13686 · v1 · submitted 2026-05-13 · 💻 cs.CV · cs.AI

Recognition: unknown

Cross Modality Image Translation In Medical Imaging Using Generative Frameworks

Giulia Romoli , Alessia Capoccia , Filippo Ruffini , Francesco Di Feola , Luca Boldrini , Arturo Chiti , Renato Cuocolo , Tugba Akinci D'Antonoli
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Fatemeh Darvizeh Marcello Di Pumpo Bradley J. Erickson Liu Fang Deborah Fazzini Paola Feraco Fabrizia Gelardi Francesco Gossetti Ana Isabel Hern\'aiz Ferrer Michail E. Klontzas Seyedmehdi Payabvash Katrine Riklund Sara N. Strandberg Valerio Guarrasi Paolo Soda
Authors on Pith no claims yet

Pith reviewed 2026-05-14 20:14 UTC · model grok-4.3

classification 💻 cs.CV cs.AI
keywords image-to-image translationGANmedical imaging3D synthesisoncologyCT to PETdiffusion modelsvisual Turing test
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The pith

GANs outperform latent models in standardized 3D medical image translation across 11 oncology datasets.

A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.

The paper creates a uniform testing setup for models that convert one medical scan type into another, such as CT to PET, using 3D volumes instead of 2D slices. It runs 77 experiments comparing three GAN-based methods against four latent generative approaches on scans from head, lung, and pelvis regions. GANs produce higher quality results overall, with SRGAN showing clear statistical edges, while all models have trouble with tiny lesions and PET intensity values. A test with 17 physicians finds they cannot reliably distinguish the generated images from real ones.

Core claim

Under identical preprocessing, splitting, training, and evaluation conditions, generative adversarial networks consistently exceed the performance of latent generative models in cross-modality 3D image synthesis for oncology, with SRGAN achieving statistically significant superiority; lesion-level breakdowns indicate reliable shape preservation but weaker handling of small structures and absolute uptake intensities in CT-to-PET tasks, and a visual Turing test with physicians yields 56.7 percent classification accuracy.

What carries the argument

The standardized comparative evaluation framework that enforces uniform preprocessing, data splits, inference rules, and multi-level metrics including lesion analysis and visual Turing tests across 77 experiments on 11 datasets.

If this is right

  • SRGAN becomes the default starting point for virtual scanning pipelines in head/neck, lung, and pelvis oncology.
  • All synthesis methods require targeted improvements for small-lesion fidelity and PET uptake accuracy.
  • Standardized 3D benchmarks replace isolated 2D task evaluations to enable fair model comparisons.
  • Clinical workflows can incorporate synthetic volumes once perceptual tests confirm indistinguishability from real acquisitions.

Where Pith is reading between the lines

These are editorial extensions of the paper, not claims the author makes directly.

  • Reducing the need for multiple physical scans could lower patient radiation dose and scan time in routine oncology follow-up.
  • The gap between quantitative metrics and physician preference points to a need for perceptual loss terms or clinician-in-the-loop training.
  • Hybrid architectures that combine adversarial training with diffusion-style stability may close the remaining performance differences on small structures.

Load-bearing premise

Uniform preprocessing, splitting, and inference rules applied to heterogeneous datasets and modalities do not inadvertently favor GAN architectures over latent models.

What would settle it

Retraining the latent models on the same eleven datasets with hyperparameters and augmentation choices tuned specifically for them, then re-running the full lesion-level and physician evaluation, would show whether they can match or exceed GAN scores.

Figures

Figures reproduced from arXiv: 2605.13686 by Alessia Capoccia, Ana Isabel Hern\'aiz Ferrer, Arturo Chiti, Bradley J. Erickson, Deborah Fazzini, Fabrizia Gelardi, Fatemeh Darvizeh, Filippo Ruffini, Francesco Di Feola, Francesco Gossetti, Giulia Romoli, Katrine Riklund, Liu Fang, Luca Boldrini, Marcello Di Pumpo, Michail E. Klontzas, Paola Feraco, Paolo Soda, Renato Cuocolo, Sara N. Strandberg, Seyedmehdi Payabvash, Tugba Akinci D'Antonoli, Valerio Guarrasi.

Figure 1
Figure 1. Figure 1: I2I translation tasks. Overview of paired I2I translation tasks selected for this study, grouped by anatomical region (lung, A; head/neck, B; and pelvis, C). Triangle vertices represent the three imaging modalities (CT, MRI, and PET). Inter-modality translations are represented by arrows between vertices, while intra-modality ones are indicated by self-loops. Arrow colors are assigned based on clinical rel… view at source ↗
Figure 2
Figure 2. Figure 2: The proposed benchmark experiments. Each of the 11 dataset configurations (left) is evaluated against all 7 generative models (centre) using 2 evaluation metrics (right), yielding 77 experimental combinations in total. selected as widely adopted for I2I translation in the medical imaging literature. Pix2Pix and CycleGAN are GAN baselines in the vast majority of medical I2I studies [3], while SRGAN is repre… view at source ↗
Figure 3
Figure 3. Figure 3: Quantitative performance. Radar charts (PSNR on the right and SSIM on the left) comparing seven I2I synthesis models across eleven task-anatomy configurations. on EnhancePET down to 0.57 on Synthrad25 MRI-to-CT (lung), whereas CycleGAN exhibits a narrower range across the same tasks (0.94 to 0.66). Latent generative models generally fall below their GAN counterparts, with the gap being most pronounced on s… view at source ↗
Figure 4
Figure 4. Figure 4: Error maps. Visual comparison across I2I translation tasks, for the two best-performing GAN-based (SRGAN and CycleGAN) and latent generative models (BBridge and FlowM). For each task, we display the target and input images (first column, first and second row respectively); the corresponding model predictions (first row); and the associated error maps with respect to the reference target (second row), compu… view at source ↗
Figure 5
Figure 5. Figure 5: Lesion analysis from BraTS23. PSNR and SSIM vs lesion size group for the MRI T2w-to-T2f task (BraTS dataset, median lesion diameter: 51.2 mm, IQR: 37.9–62.3 mm) [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p014_5.png] view at source ↗
Figure 6
Figure 6. Figure 6: Lesion analysis from autoPET. PSNR and SSIM vs lesion size group for the CT-to-PET task (autoPET dataset, median lesion diameter: 19.3 mm, IQR: 15.2–30.3 mm). Figures 5 and 6 report PSNR and SSIM as a function of lesion size for the two datasets, respectively. In the BraTS23 dataset ( [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p014_6.png] view at source ↗
Figure 7
Figure 7. Figure 7: Summary of results from Visual Turing test, Part 1. Summary of classification performance in Visual Turing test, Part 1. Each column reports the rate of correctly (blue) and incorrectly (red) classified images, separately for real and AI-generated cases (top and bottom row, respectively). Best: physician with the highest balanced accuracy (R3). Worst (Real) and Worst (AI-gen): physicians with the lowest ac… view at source ↗
Figure 8
Figure 8. Figure 8: Results from Visual Turing test, Part 2. Pairwise preference results for GAN models (left) and latent generative models (right), for each task and as an overall aggregate ("Average") [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p017_8.png] view at source ↗
Figure 9
Figure 9. Figure 9: Results from Visual Turing test, Part 3. Three-way ranking results (Visual Turing test, Part 3). Each panel reports the percentage of rank 1 (most realistic), rank 2, and rank 3 (least realistic) assignments across all triplets, aggregated over all tasks and physicians. throughout the test. In contrast, in the T2w-to-T2f triplet, only 17.6% of readers were fooled, with the large majority correctly assignin… view at source ↗
Figure 10
Figure 10. Figure 10: Overview of the pre-processing pipeline. Each volume passes through eight sequential steps: body masking; voxel resampling; clipping; intensity normalization; spatial padding; foreground mask computation; mask intersection to obtain the common anatomical region of interest; and patch extraction. Cropping was performed exclusively along the axial axis: the inferior and superior extents of the lung mask wer… view at source ↗
Figure 11
Figure 11. Figure 11: Overview of the proposed benchmarking framework. The pipeline consists of four stages: (1) a configuration module, where the user specifies data, model, and training parameters and the dataset is split into training and test sets (75%–25%); (2) a data pipeline, which applies a sequence of preprocessing steps to produce paired source–target volumes; (3) a training pipeline, where GAN-based models operate i… view at source ↗
Figure 12
Figure 12. Figure 12: The Visual Turing test platform. Each volume was displayed through a multi-planar viewer rendered by a grid layout providing three orthogonal anatomical planes (axial, sagittal, and coronal) alongside a 3D surface reconstruction. In Part 1, a single volume was displayed and participants were asked to classify the image as either Real or AI-generated using two mutually exclusive buttons positioned below th… view at source ↗
read the original abstract

Medical image-to-image (I2I) translation enables virtual scanning, i.e. the synthesis of a target imaging modality from a source one without additional acquisitions. Despite growing interest, most proposed methods operate on 2D slices, are evaluated on isolated tasks with different experimental set-ups and lack clinical validation. The primary contribution of this work is a reproducible, standardized comparative evaluation of 3D I2I translation methods in oncological imaging, designed to standardize preprocessing, splitting, inference, and multi-level evaluation across heterogeneous clinical tasks. Within this framework, we compare seven generative models, three Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs: Pix2Pix, CycleGAN, SRGAN) and four latent generative models (Latent Diffusion Model, Latent Diffusion Model+ControlNet, Brownian Bridge, Flow Matching), across eleven datasets spanning three anatomical regions (head/neck, lung, pelvis) and four translation directions (cone-beam CT to CT, MRI to CT, CT to PET, MRI T2-weighted to T2-FLAIR), for a total of 77 experiments under uniform training, inference, and evaluation conditions. The results show that GANs outperform latent generative models across all tasks, with SRGAN achieving statistically significant superiority. Our lesion-level analysis reveals that all models struggle with small lesions and that, in CT to PET synthesis, models reproduce lesion shape more reliably than absolute uptake-related intensity. We also performed a Visual Turing test administered to 17 physicians, including 15 radiologists, which shows near-chance classification accuracy (56.7%), confirming that synthetic volumes are largely indistinguishable from real acquisitions, while exposing a dissociation between quantitative metrics and clinical preference.

Editorial analysis

A structured set of objections, weighed in public.

Desk editor's note, referee report, simulated authors' rebuttal, and a circularity audit. Tearing a paper down is the easy half of reading it; the pith above is the substance, this is the friction.

Referee Report

1 major / 0 minor

Summary. The manuscript presents a standardized comparative evaluation of seven 3D generative models for cross-modality image-to-image translation in oncological imaging. It compares three GANs (Pix2Pix, CycleGAN, SRGAN) and four latent models (LDM, LDM+ControlNet, Brownian Bridge, Flow Matching) across eleven datasets spanning head/neck, lung, and pelvis regions and four translation directions, for a total of 77 experiments under uniform preprocessing, splitting, training, and inference protocols. Results indicate GANs outperform latent models with SRGAN achieving statistically significant superiority; lesion-level analysis shows struggles with small lesions and better shape than intensity reproduction in CT-to-PET; a visual Turing test with 17 physicians yields 56.7% accuracy, indicating synthetic volumes are largely indistinguishable from real acquisitions.

Significance. If the results hold, this work delivers a reproducible benchmark for 3D medical I2I translation by enforcing consistent experimental conditions across heterogeneous tasks and modalities. The scale (77 experiments), inclusion of statistical tests, lesion-specific breakdowns, and physician visual Turing test provide concrete empirical grounding and clinical relevance that could inform model selection and highlight persistent challenges such as small-lesion fidelity and PET uptake accuracy.

major comments (1)
  1. [Experimental Setup] Experimental Setup: The central claim that GANs (particularly SRGAN) outperform latent generative models rests on a single shared preprocessing, splitting, and training recipe applied uniformly to all models. While this protocol enables direct comparability, it may systematically favor GAN architectures, which often converge reliably under standard medical intensity normalization and short schedules, whereas latent diffusion and flow models frequently require longer training, modality-specific noise schedules, or augmentations. The manuscript should explicitly discuss whether per-model hyperparameter optimization was considered and, if not, justify why the uniform protocol is the appropriate basis for ranking intrinsic capabilities rather than protocol compatibility.

Simulated Author's Rebuttal

1 responses · 0 unresolved

We thank the referee for the constructive feedback and positive assessment of our work. We address the single major comment below and will revise the manuscript accordingly to strengthen the discussion of our experimental design.

read point-by-point responses

  1. Referee: [Experimental Setup] Experimental Setup: The central claim that GANs (particularly SRGAN) outperform latent generative models rests on a single shared preprocessing, splitting, and training recipe applied uniformly to all models. While this protocol enables direct comparability, it may systematically favor GAN architectures, which often converge reliably under standard medical intensity normalization and short schedules, whereas latent diffusion and flow models frequently require longer training, modality-specific noise schedules, or augmentations. The manuscript should explicitly discuss whether per-model hyperparameter optimization was considered and, if not, justify why the uniform protocol is the appropriate basis for ranking intrinsic capabilities rather than protocol compatibility.

    Authors: We appreciate the referee's observation on this key design choice. The uniform protocol was intentionally selected as the core of our contribution: to deliver a reproducible benchmark that enables direct, apples-to-apples comparison of the seven models under identical preprocessing, splitting, training schedules, and inference conditions across 77 experiments. Per-model hyperparameter optimization was deliberately not performed, because doing so would have broken the standardization that allows us to attribute performance differences to the architectures themselves rather than to unequal tuning effort. This setup mirrors a realistic clinical or research scenario in which practitioners apply a single, practical recipe across heterogeneous models. We fully acknowledge that the reported rankings reflect performance under this shared protocol and may not represent the absolute best achievable results for each model with extensive, architecture-specific tuning (e.g., longer diffusion schedules or modality-specific augmentations). We will revise the manuscript to add an explicit paragraph in the Experimental Setup and a dedicated limitations subsection that states this caveat and justifies the uniform protocol as the appropriate basis for ranking relative capabilities under consistent, reproducible conditions. revision: yes

Circularity Check

0 steps flagged

No circularity: direct empirical comparison under fixed protocols

full rationale

The paper conducts a standardized empirical evaluation of seven existing generative models (Pix2Pix, CycleGAN, SRGAN, LDM, LDM+ControlNet, Brownian Bridge, Flow Matching) across 77 experiments on eleven datasets. No derivations, equations, or predictions are claimed that reduce reported metrics to fitted parameters or self-defined quantities by construction. Performance numbers arise from direct inference on held-out splits using uniform preprocessing and evaluation rules; statistical significance is computed from these independent runs. Any self-citations refer only to the original model papers and do not load-bear the comparative claims. The work is self-contained against external benchmarks and exhibits no self-definitional, fitted-input, or uniqueness-imported circularity.

Axiom & Free-Parameter Ledger

0 free parameters · 1 axioms · 0 invented entities

The comparison rests on standard deep-learning training assumptions and the representativeness of the selected clinical datasets; no new entities or ad-hoc constants are introduced by the paper itself.

axioms (1)
  • domain assumption Standard assumptions in supervised and unsupervised training of generative models hold under the uniform protocol
    Invoked when claiming model superiority from training under identical conditions

pith-pipeline@v0.9.0 · 5718 in / 1282 out tokens · 42024 ms · 2026-05-14T20:14:32.721527+00:00 · methodology

discussion (0)

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