Toward general text-guided multimodal brain MRI synthesis for diagnosis and medical image analysis

Multimodal brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) offers complementary insights into brain structure and function, thereby improving the diagnostic accuracy of neurological disorders and advancing brain-related research. However, the widespread applicability of MRI is substantially limited by restricted scanner accessibility and prolonged acquisition times. Here, we present TUMSyn, a text-guided universal MRI synthesis model capable of generating brain MRI specified by textual imaging metadata from routinely acquired scans. We ensure the reliability of TUMSyn by constructing a brain MRI database comprising 31,407 3D images across 7 MRI modalities from 13 worldwide centers and pre-training an MRI-specific text encoder to process text prompts effectively. Experiments on diverse datasets and physician assessments indicate that TUMSyn-generated images can be utilized along with acquired MRI scan(s) to facilitate large-scale MRI-based screening and diagnosis of multiple brain diseases, substantially reducing the time and cost of MRI in the healthcare system.