Investigating the Role of Bilateral Symmetry for Inpainting Brain MRI
Journal:
arXiv
Published Date:
Apr 14, 2025
Abstract
Inpainting has recently emerged as a valuable and interesting technology to
employ in the analysis of medical imaging data, in particular brain MRI. A wide
variety of methodologies for inpainting MRI have been proposed and demonstrated
on tasks including anomaly detection. In this work we investigate the
statistical relationship between inpainted brain structures and the amount of
subject-specific conditioning information, i.e. the other areas of the image
that are masked. In particular, we analyse the distribution of inpainting
results when masking additional regions of the image, specifically the
contra-lateral structure. This allows us to elucidate where in the brain the
model is drawing information from, and in particular, what is the importance of
hemispherical symmetry? Our experiments interrogate a diffusion inpainting
model through analysing the inpainting of subcortical brain structures based on
intensity and estimated area change. We demonstrate that some structures show a
strong influence of symmetry in the conditioning of the inpainting process.
