Pre-trained Diffusion Models for Plug-and-Play Medical Image Enhancement

Jun Ma, Yuanzhi Zhu, Chenyu You, Bo Wang

Abstract: Deep learning-based medical image enhancement methods (e.g., denoising and super-resolution) mainly rely on paired data and correspondingly the well-trained models can only handle one type of task. In this paper, we address the limitation with a diffusion model-based framework that mitigates the requirement of paired data and can simultaneously handle multiple enhancement tasks by one pre-trained diffusion model without fine-tuning. Experiments on low-dose CT and heart MR datasets demonstrate that the proposed method is versatile and robust for image denoising and super-resolution. We believe our work constitutes a practical and versatile solution to scalable and generalizable image enhancement.