Frequency-consistent synthesis and selective transfer for medical image analysis

Zhuhui Wang, Jianwei Zuo, Xin Peng, Kai Zhong, Xuliang Deng +1

Complementary imaging is not always available, and realistic synthesis does not necessarily improve downstream analysis. Here we introduce a training framework linking medical image synthesis to task learning through adaptive frequency consistency and selective feature transfer. Image-specific frequency constraints encourage consistency of structure and detail. Features are transferred only when a teacher using synthetic images achieves a lower task-error score than the student by a task-specific margin on a labelled training sample. Evaluations across five datasets show improved translation fidelity with three adversarial and diffusion-based translators trained without paired supervision, alongside gains in brain-tumour segmentation on tumour-containing slices and lesion centre-point detection. All 105 reported paired comparisons yielded point estimates favouring the proposed methods, including 36 external translation comparisons on post?treatment MRI without retraining. These findings support synthetic modalities as task-oriented complements to acquired scans when complementary imaging is unavailable.