Surf2CT: Cascaded 3D Flow Matching Models for Torso 3D CT Synthesis from Skin Surface
Journal:
arXiv
Published Date:
May 28, 2025
Abstract
We present Surf2CT, a novel cascaded flow matching framework that synthesizes
full 3D computed tomography (CT) volumes of the human torso from external
surface scans and simple demographic data (age, sex, height, weight). This is
the first approach capable of generating realistic volumetric internal anatomy
images solely based on external body shape and demographics, without any
internal imaging. Surf2CT proceeds through three sequential stages: (1) Surface
Completion, reconstructing a complete signed distance function (SDF) from
partial torso scans using conditional 3D flow matching; (2) Coarse CT
Synthesis, generating a low-resolution CT volume from the completed SDF and
demographic information; and (3) CT Super-Resolution, refining the coarse
volume into a high-resolution CT via a patch-wise conditional flow model. Each
stage utilizes a 3D-adapted EDM2 backbone trained via flow matching. We trained
our model on a combined dataset of 3,198 torso CT scans (approximately 1.13
million axial slices) sourced from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and the
AutoPET challenge. Evaluation on 700 paired torso surface-CT cases demonstrated
strong anatomical fidelity: organ volumes exhibited small mean percentage
differences (range from -11.1% to 4.4%), and muscle/fat body composition
metrics matched ground truth with strong correlation (range from 0.67 to 0.96).
Lung localization had minimal bias (mean difference -2.5 mm), and surface
completion significantly improved metrics (Chamfer distance: from 521.8 mm to
2.7 mm; Intersection-over-Union: from 0.87 to 0.98). Surf2CT establishes a new
paradigm for non-invasive internal anatomical imaging using only external data,
opening opportunities for home-based healthcare, preventive medicine, and
personalized clinical assessments without the risks associated with
conventional imaging techniques.
