Diffusion models (DMs) are a type of generative model that has a huge impact on image synthesis and beyond. They achieve state-of-the-art generation results in various generative tasks. A great diversity of conditioning inputs, such as text or bounding boxes, are accessible to control the generation. In this work, we propose a conditioning mechanism utilizing Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) as feature conditioning to guide the denoising process. Based on set theory, we provide a comprehensive theoretical analysis that shows that conditional latent distribution based on features and classes is significantly different, so that conditional latent distribution on features produces fewer defect generations than conditioning on classes. Two diffusion models conditioned on the Gaussian mixture model are trained separately for comparison. Experiments support our findings. A novel gradient function called the negative Gaussian mixture gradient (NGMG) is proposed and applied in diffusion model training with an additional classifier. Training stability has improved. We also theoretically prove that NGMG shares the same benefit as the Earth Mover distance (Wasserstein) as a more sensible cost function when learning distributions supported by low-dimensional manifolds.

We propose an Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) learning algorithm, based on our previous work of GMM expansion idea. The new algorithm brings more robustness and simplicity than classic Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm. It also improves the accuracy and only take 1 iteration for learning. We theoretically proof that this new algorithm is guarantee to converge regardless the parameters initialisation. We compare our GMM expansion method with classic probability layers in neural network leads to demonstrably better capability to overcome data uncertainty and inverse problem. Finally, we test GMM based generator which shows a potential to build further application that able to utilized distribution random sampling for stochastic variation as well as variation control.

Deep learning (DL) models for medical image segmentation are highly influenced by intensity variations of input images and lack generalization due to primarily utilizing pixels' intensity information for inference. Acquiring sufficient training data is another challenge limiting models' applications. We proposed to leverage the consistency of organs' anatomical shape and position information in medical images. We introduced a framework leveraging recurring anatomical patterns through global binary masks for organ segmentation. Two scenarios were studied.1) Global binary masks were the only model's (i.e. U-Net) input, forcing exclusively encoding organs' position and shape information for segmentation/localization.2) Global binary masks were incorporated as an additional channel functioning as position/shape clues to mitigate training data scarcity. Two datasets of the brain and heart CT images with their ground-truth were split into (26:10:10) and (12:3:5) for training, validation, and test respectively. Training exclusively on global binary masks led to Dice scores of 0.77(0.06) and 0.85(0.04), with the average Euclidian distance of 3.12(1.43)mm and 2.5(0.93)mm relative to the center of mass of the ground truth for the brain and heart structures respectively. The outcomes indicate that a surprising degree of position and shape information is encoded through global binary masks. Incorporating global binary masks led to significantly higher accuracy relative to the model trained on only CT images in small subsets of training data; the performance improved by 4.3-125.3% and 1.3-48.1% for 1-8 training cases of the brain and heart datasets respectively. The findings imply the advantages of utilizing global binary masks for building generalizable models and to compensate for training data scarcity.

The use of neural networks to directly predict three-dimensional dose distributions for automatic planning is becoming popular. However, the existing methods only use patient anatomy as input and assume consistent beam configuration for all patients in the training database. The purpose of this work is to develop a more general model that, in addition to patient anatomy, also considers variable beam configurations, to achieve a more comprehensive automatic planning with a potentially easier clinical implementation, without the need of training specific models for different beam settings.

With the advancement of treatment modalities in radiation therapy for cancer patients, outcomes have improved, but at the cost of increased treatment plan complexity and planning time. The accurate prediction of dose distributions would alleviate this issue by guiding clinical plan optimization to save time and maintain high quality plans. We have modified a convolutional deep network model, U-net (originally designed for segmentation purposes), for predicting dose from patient image contours. We show that, as an example, we are able to accurately predict the dose of intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) for prostate cancer patients, where the average dice similarity coefficient is 0.91 when comparing the predicted vs. true isodose volumes between 0% and 100% of the prescription dose. The average value of the absolute differences in [max, mean] dose is found to be under 5% of the prescription dose, specifically for each structure is [1.80%, 1.03%](PTV), [1.94%, 4.22%](Bladder), [1.80%, 0.48%](Body), [3.87%, 1.79%](L Femoral Head), [5.07%, 2.55%](R Femoral Head), and [1.26%, 1.62%](Rectum) of the prescription dose. We thus managed to map a desired radiation dose distribution from a patient's PTV and OAR contours. As an additional advantage, relatively little data was used in the techniques and models described in this paper.