Login (DCU Staff Only)
Login (DCU Staff Only)

DORAS | DCU Research Repository

Explore open access research and scholarly works from DCU

Advanced Search

Anatomy-Preserving Counterfactual Edits in Breast MRI via Guided Diffusion

Maksudov, Bulat, Curran, Kathleen M. orcid logoORCID: 0000-0003-0095-9337 and Mileo, Alessandra orcid logoORCID: 0000-0002-6614-6462 (2025) Anatomy-Preserving Counterfactual Edits in Breast MRI via Guided Diffusion. In: Zhang, Zhang et al., (ed.) Artificial Intelligence and Imaging for Diagnostic and Treatment Challenges in Breast Care.Second Deep Breast Workshop, Deep-Breath 2025 Held in Conjunction with MICCAI 2025 Daejeon, South Korea, September 23, 2025 Proceedings. Lecture Notes in Computer Science . Springer, Switzerland, pp. 1-379. ISBN 1611-3349

Abstract
Dynamic contrast-enhanced breast MRI is highly sensitive but difficult to interpret. We ask whether counterfactual edits produced by a latent diffusion model can reveal image cues linked to tumor presence while preserving anatomy. Starting from a latent diffusion backbone, we fine-tune the U-Net denoiser on the MAMA-MIA dataset and generate slice-level edits via DDIM inversion and null-text inversion. We study two operations: curtailment (suppression of tumor evidence) and exaggeration (amplification or addition of tumor-like features). Semantic impact is quantified with a frozen 3D nnU-Net trained on expert tumor masks. Across cohorts, curtailment yields a consistent 18–43% mean reduction in predicted tumor extent, whereas exaggeration is less reliable, highlighting an asymmetry between subtractive and additive edits. These results suggest diffusion-based counterfactuals provide interpretable, anatomy-preserving “what-if” views that complement saliency maps for model auditing, hypothesis generation, and training (Code and trained models are available at https://github.com/Luab/breastmri-counterfactuals.)
Metadata
Item Type:Book Section
Refereed:Yes
Uncontrolled Keywords:Explainable AI; Diffusion models; Counterfactual explanations
Subjects:Computer Science > Artificial intelligence
Computer Science > Computer engineering
Computer Science > Computer software
Computer Science > Machine learning
DCU Faculties and Centres:DCU Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Engineering and Computing
DCU Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Engineering and Computing > School of Computing
Publisher:Springer
Official URL:https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-032-0...
Copyright Information:Authors
ID Code:31872
Deposited On:18 Nov 2025 15:12 by Gordon Kennedy . Last Modified 18 Nov 2025 15:12
Documents

Full text available as:

[thumbnail of 978-3-032-05559-0.pdf]
Preview
PDF - Requires a PDF viewer such as GSview, Xpdf or Adobe Acrobat Reader
Creative Commons: Attribution 4.0
52MB
Downloads

Downloads

Downloads per month over past year

Archive Staff Only: edit this record