Simulating Post-Neoadjuvant Chemotherapy Breast Cancer MRI via Diffusion Model with Prompt Tuning

초록

Neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC) is a common therapy option before the main surgery for breast cancer. Response to NAC is monitored using follow-up dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI). Accurate prediction of NAC response helps with treatment planning. Here, we adopt maximum intensity projection images from DCE-MRI to generate post-treatment images (i.e., 3 or 12 weeks after NAC) from pre-treatment images leveraging the emerging diffusion model. We introduce prompt tuning to account for the known clinical factors affecting response to NAC. Our model performed better than other generative models in image quality metrics. Our model was better at generating images that reflected changes in tumor size ac-cording to pCR compared to other models. Ablation study confirmed the design choices of our method. Our study has the potential to help with precision medicine. Our code is available at github.com/jongdory/NAC-sim. © 2025 IEEE.

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