A New Chapter for Medical Image Generation: The Stable Diffusion Method

Data collecting and sharing have been widely accepted and adopted to improve the performance of deep learning models in almost every field. Nevertheless, in the medical field, sharing the data of patients can raise several critical issues, such as privacy and security or even legal issues. Synthetic medical images have been proposed to overcome such challenges; these synthetic images are generated by learning the distribution of realistic medical images but completely different from them so that they can be shared and used across different medical institutions. Currently, the diffusion model (DM) has gained lots of attention due to its potential to generate realistic and high-resolution images, particularly outperforming generative adversarial networks (GANs) in many applications. The DM defines state of the art for various computer vision tasks such as image inpainting, class-conditional image synthesis, and others. However, the diffusion model is time and power consumption due to its large size. Therefore, this paper proposes a lightweight DM to synthesize the medical image; we use computer tomography (CT) scans for SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) as the training dataset. Then we do extensive simulations to show the performance of the proposed diffusion model in medical image generation, and then we explain the key component of the model.