Enhancing Privacy: The Utility of Stand-Alone Synthetic CT and MRI for Tumor and Bone Segmentation

André Ferreira; Kunpeng Xie; Caroline Wilpert; Gustavo Correia; Felix Barajas Ordonez; Tiago Gil Oliveira; Maike Bode; Robert Siepmann; Frank Hölzle; Rainer Röhrig; Jens Kleesiek; Daniel Truhn; Jan Egger; Victor Alves; Behrus Puladi

arXiv · 2506.12106

Enhancing Privacy: The Utility of Stand-Alone Synthetic CT and MRI for Tumor and Bone Segmentation

André Ferreira·Kunpeng Xie·Caroline Wilpert·Gustavo Correia·Felix Barajas Ordonez·Tiago Gil Oliveira·Maike Bode·Robert Siepmann·Frank Hölzle·Rainer Röhrig·Jens Kleesiek·Daniel Truhn·Jan Egger·Victor Alves·Behrus Puladi

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Abstract

AI requires extensive datasets, while medical data is subject to high data protection. Anonymization is essential, but poses a challenge for some regions, such as the head, as identifying structures overlap with regions of clinical interest. Synthetic data offers a potential solution, but studies often lack rigorous evaluation of realism and utility. Therefore, we investigate to what extent synthetic data can replace real data in segmentation tasks. We employed head and neck cancer CT scans and brain glioma MRI scans from two large datasets. Synthetic data were generated using generative adversarial networks and diffusion models. We evaluated the quality of the synthetic data using MAE, MS-SSIM, Radiomics and a Visual Turing Test (VTT) performed by 5 radiologists and their usefulness in segmentation tasks using DSC. Radiomics indicates high fidelity of synthetic MRIs, but fall short in producing highly realistic CT tissue, with correlation coefficient of 0.8784 and 0.5461 for MRI and CT tumors, respectively. DSC results indicate limited utility of synthetic data: tumor segmentation achieved DSC=0.064 on CT and 0.834 on MRI, while bone segmentation a mean DSC=0.841. Relation between DSC and correlation is observed, but is limited by the complexity of the task. VTT results show synthetic CTs' utility, but with limited educational applications. Synthetic data can be used independently for the segmentation task, although limited by the complexity of the structures to segment. Advancing generative models to better tolerate heterogeneous inputs and learn subtle details is essential for enhancing their realism and expanding their application potential.

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André Ferreira, Kunpeng Xie, Caroline Wilpert, Gustavo Correia, Felix Barajas Ordonez, Tiago Gil Oliveira, Maike Bode, Robert Siepmann, Frank Hölzle, Rainer Röhrig, Jens Kleesiek, Daniel Truhn, Jan Egger, Victor Alves, Behrus Puladi. 2025-06-13. Enhancing Privacy: The Utility of Stand-Alone Synthetic CT and MRI for Tumor and Bone Segmentation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12106

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