Evaluating Synthetic Diffusion MRI Maps created with Diffusion Denoising Probabilistic Models

Generative AI models, such as Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, and MidJourney, have recently gained widespread attention as they can generate high-quality synthetic images by learning the distribution of complex, high-dimensional image data. These models are now being adapted for medical and neuroimaging data, where AI-based tasks such as diagnostic classification and predictive modeling typically use deep learning methods, such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and vision transformers (ViTs), with interpretability enhancements. In our study, we trained latent diffusion models (LDM) and denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPM) specifically to generate synthetic diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) maps. We developed models that generate synthetic DTI maps of mean diffusivity by training on real 3D DTI scans, and evaluating realism and diversity of the synthetic data using maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) and multi-scale structural similarity index (MS-SSIM). We also assess the performance of a 3D CNN-based sex classifier, by training on combinations of real and synthetic DTIs, to check if performance improved when adding the synthetic scans during training, as a form of data augmentation. Our approach efficiently produces realistic and diverse synthetic data, potentially helping to create interpretable AI-driven maps for neuroscience research and clinical diagnostics.