Memory-Efficient 3D Denoising Diffusion Models for Medical Image Processing

Denoising diffusion models have recently achieved state-of-the-art performance in many image-generation tasks. They do, however, require a large amount of computational resources. This limits their application to medical tasks, where we often deal with large 3D volumes, like high-resolution three-dimensional data. In this work, we present a number of different ways to reduce the resource consumption for 3D diffusion models and apply them to a dataset of 3D images. The main contribution of this paper is the memory-efficient patch-based diffusion model PatchDDM, which can be applied to the total volume during inference while the training is performed only on patches. Without limiting the application of the proposed diffusion model for image generation, we evaluate the method on the tumor segmentation task of the BraTS2020 dataset and demonstrate that we can generate meaningful three-dimensional segmentations.