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BrainNormalizer: Anatomy-Informed Pseudo-Healthy Brain Reconstruction from Tumor MRI via Edge-Guided ControlNet

Authors: Min Gu Kwak, Yeonju Lee, Hairong Wang, Jing Li

Published: 2025-11-17

arXiv ID: 2511.12853v1

Added to Library: 2025-11-18 04:00 UTC

📄 Abstract

Brain tumors are among the most clinically significant neurological diseases and remain a major cause of morbidity and mortality due to their aggressive growth and structural heterogeneity. As tumors expand, they induce substantial anatomical deformation that disrupts both local tissue organization and global brain architecture, complicating diagnosis, treatment planning, and surgical navigation. Yet a subject-specific reference of how the brain would appear without tumor-induced changes is fundamentally unobtainable in clinical practice. We present BrainNormalizer, an anatomy-informed diffusion framework that reconstructs pseudo-healthy MRIs directly from tumorous scans by conditioning the generative process on boundary cues extracted from the subject's own anatomy. This boundary-guided conditioning enables anatomically plausible pseudo-healthy reconstruction without requiring paired non-tumorous and tumorous scans. BrainNormalizer employs a two-stage training strategy. The pretrained diffusion model is first adapted through inpainting-based fine-tuning on tumorous and non-tumorous scans. Next, an edge-map-guided ControlNet branch is trained to inject fine-grained anatomical contours into the frozen decoder while preserving learned priors. During inference, a deliberate misalignment strategy pairs tumorous inputs with non-tumorous prompts and mirrored contralateral edge maps, leveraging hemispheric correspondence to guide reconstruction. On the BraTS2020 dataset, BrainNormalizer achieves strong quantitative performance and qualitatively produces anatomically plausible reconstructions in tumor-affected regions while retaining overall structural coherence. BrainNormalizer provides clinically reliable anatomical references for treatment planning and supports new research directions in counterfactual modeling and tumor-induced deformation analysis.

🔍 Key Points

  • VEIL introduces a novel approach to jailbreaking text-to-video (T2V) models by exploiting learned cross-modal associations between audio cues and stylistic visual elements, shifting the focus from manipulating explicit unsafe prompts to using benign components that yield harmful outputs.
  • The framework formalizes attack generation as a constrained optimization problem, employing a guided search method to balance stealth and attack effectiveness, achieving a 23% improvement in attack success rates over previous methods across several commercial T2V models.
  • VEIL incorporates a modular prompt design which consists of neutral scene anchors, auditory triggers, and stylistic modulators, enhancing the ability of prompts to bypass safety filters while still leading to undesirable video content.
  • Extensive experiments validate the efficacy of VEIL, demonstrating superior performance against current techniques and revealing vulnerabilities in T2V models that may circumvent traditional defenses, particularly in detecting harmful outputs.
  • The study highlights critical limitations in existing safety mechanisms for T2V models and sets the stage for future research into improving model robustness against subtle attack vectors.

💡 Why This Paper Matters

This paper is crucial as it identifies and exploits a new class of vulnerabilities in T2V models, demonstrating how implicit knowledge encoded in these models can be manipulated through structured yet benign interactions. The findings underscore the need for reassessing the safety and security of generative AI systems, particularly as T2V models become more prevalent in producing potentially harmful content.

🎯 Why It's Interesting for AI Security Researchers

The work is highly relevant to AI security researchers as it challenges traditional notions of prompt safety and highlights the need for advanced protective measures in generative models. By proposing novel attack vectors that exploit model architecture and learned associations, this research can inform future security frameworks, defenses, and robustness assessments in generative AI applications.

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