Fast-cWDM Brain MRI: Fast Conditional Wavelet Diffusion Model for Synthesis Brain MRI Modality
In this paper, we present a novel and efficient framework for cross-modality medical image synthesis, developed for BraSyn-Task 8. Our method combines the fast-sampling capabilities of the Fast-Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (Fast-DDPM) with Discrete Wavelet-Transformed components, as used in Conditional Wavelet Diffusion Models. By reducing the number of denoising steps to 100 and using wavelet-transformed inputs, we accelerate both training and inference and reduce memory usage while preserving high image quality. The framework was trained on the BraTS 2025 dataset, which includes four magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) modalities: T1-weighted, contrast-enhanced T1-weighted (T1c), T2-weighted, and FLAIR. We developed four independent models, each synthesizing one missing modality from the remaining three. Evaluation on the BraSyn 2025 Task 8 public validation set demonstrated competitive performance using standard image metrics: mean squared error, signal-to-noise ratio, and structural similarity index. Our method achieved Third place in the challenge in the final test data, with fast inference times (average 41- 67 seconds per case). To assess clinical relevance, we applied a pretrained nnU-Net segmentation model on the synthesized modalities. Segmentation results yielded high Dice coefficients: 0.877 for the whole tumor, 0.769 for the tumor core, and 0.667 for the enhancing tumor. These results confirm the effectiveness and reliability of our approach for missing-modality synthesis, enabling accurate downstream analysis in high-dimensional medical imaging tasks. Our team in the challenge is USD-2025-Chato-Sereda (Team ID: 3551654).Github link: https://github.com/tsereda/brats-synthesis