Treatment-aware Diffusion Probabilistic Model for Longitudinal MRI Generation and Diffuse Glioma Growth Prediction

Diffuse gliomas are malignant brain tumors that grow widespread through the brain. The complex interactions between neoplastic cells and normal tissue, as well as the treatment-induced changes often encountered, make glioma tumor growth modeling challenging. In this paper, we present a novel end-to-end network capable of generating future tumor masks and realistic MRIs of how the tumor will look at any future time points for different treatment plans. Our model is built upon cutting-edge diffusion probabilistic models and deep-segmentation neural networks. We extended a diffusion model to include sequential multi-parametric MRI and treatment information as conditioning input to guide the generative diffusion process. This allows us to estimate tumor growth at any given time point. We trained the model using real-world postoperative longitudinal MRI data with glioma tumor growth trajectories represented as tumor segmentation maps over time. The model has demonstrated promising performance across a range of tasks, including the generation of high-quality synthetic MRIs with tumor masks, time-series tumor segmentations, and uncertainty estimation. Combined with the treatment-aware generated MRIs, the tumor growth predictions with uncertainty estimates can provide useful information for clinical decision-making.