Enhancing Multiple Sclerosis Lesion Segmentation in Multimodal MRI Scans with Diffusion Models
Alessia Rondinella, Francesco Guarnera, Oliver Giudice, Alessandro Ortis, Giulia Russo, Elena Crispino, Francesco Pappalardo, Sebastiano Battiato
Abstract
Accurate segmentation of Multiple Sclerosis (MS) lesions from Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans is crucial for clinical diagnosis and effective treatment planning. In this work, we investigate the effectiveness of Diffusion Models (DM) in achieving pixel-wise segmentation of MS lesions. DM significantly improves segmentation sensitivity, especially in regions with subtle abnormalities. We conducted extensive experiments using the magnetic resonance volumes from a public dataset, encompassing various imaging modalities. Our analysis demonstrated how DM can achieve performance levels that are on par with state-of-the-art techniques, as evidenced by a mean Dice coefficient comparable to the best existing methods. Furthermore, some variants of standard DM exhibits robustness across various imaging modalities, showcasing its versatility in clinical settings.