Flexibly Distilled 3D Rectified Flow with Anatomical Constraints for Developmental Infant Brain MRI Prediction
摘要
Longitudinal prediction of infant brain MRIs is crucial for individualized neurodevelopment tracking and disorder forecasting. However, existing methods, such as diffusion-based generative models, often struggle to capture the complex spatiotemporal dynamics of developing brains, leading to unreliable predictions that lack subject-specific, anatomically consistent growth patterns. To address this, we propose a Flexibly Distilled 3D Rectified Flow (FDRF) framework, which integrates anatomical constraints for dual-stream predictions of volumetric images and tissue maps along developmental trajectories. Our framework features an age-conditioned feature fusion module for controllable prediction with targeted age appearances and employs anatomical constraints derived from segmentation labels and high-frequency image details to ensure subject-level spatiotemporal consistency. Additionally, we introduce a flexible distillation of rectified flow, enabling a unified one-step generative model for high-fidelity cross-time predictions while preserving individualized anatomical details. Given 6-month MRIs and tissue maps as the input, our model reliably predicts their spatiotemporal growths at 12 and 24 months, outperforming existing diffusion-based baselines by relatively large margins. Our codes can be found at https://github.com/ladderlab-xjtu/FDRF .