Paper

Scaling Generative Foundation Models for Chest Radiography with Rectified Flow Transformers

Dimitrakopoulos, Panagiotis, Jones, Charles, Tsaftaris, Sotirios A, Marshall, Dominic C, Tian Xia, Cosgriff, Christopher V, Laurent Renard Triché, De Sousa Ribeiro, Fabio, Stanley, Emma A M, Glocker, Ben

2026

Overview

We introduce the first generative foundation model for chest radiograph synthesis trained from scratch at the billion-parameter scale. Existing radiographic AI models often suffer from poor generalisation across patient subpopulations, institutions, and acquisition settings, resulting in limited real-world clinical utility. Controlled, high-fidelity synthesis of chest radiographs is a promising path toward diversifying clinical datasets and evaluating the robustness of diagnostic models. Therefore, we present the largest specialist generative foundation model for chest radiographs to date, with over 1.3B parameters, trained for 1.6T tokens on a curated, heterogeneous dataset comprising 1.2M radiographs and clinical expert-guided metadata. Our model supports controllable radiograph generation and editing across multiple demographic subgroups, acquisition views, and a dozen pathologies. Moreover, we significantly advance the state of the art in radiograph synthesis fidelity, producing images that are indistinguishable from real radiographs to clinical experts.

• Publisher: Cornell University Library, arXiv.org
• Subject: Controllability / Datasets / Parameters / Radiographs / Subgroups / Synthesis