Diffusion-Based Tumor Inpainting for Renal Segmentation under Clinical Data Scarcity

Ekaterina Sedykh, Salme Ussanov, Dmytro Fedorenko, Dmytro Fishman

Deep learning segmentation of renal tumors requires large annotated datasets, yet clinical deployments typically offer only a handful of tumor-positive cases from the target site. We propose a diffusion-based inpainting framework that synthesizes anatomically plausible renal tumors within healthy CT scans, requiring no additional annotation, and provide the first systematic comparison of 2D, 2.5D, and full 3D (MAISI) synthesis strategies for this task. Training the diffusion model on public data (KiTS23, KIRC) and evaluating nnU-Net segmentation on a internal cohort across three low-data regimes, we find that 2.5D and 3D augmentation substantially reduce false positives (from $\sim$18--20\% to $\sim$3--6\%) while maintaining Dice, whereas 2D provides no consistent benefit. Crucially, the proposed 2.5D method matches full 3D synthesis on every metric at substantially lower computational cost, indicating that local volumetric consistency alone is sufficient for effective augmentation in data- and resource-scarce clinical settings.