Jana Delfino

Andrea Kim, Niloufar Saharkhiz, Elena Sizikova et al.

Development of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques in medical imaging requires access to large-scale and diverse datasets for training and evaluation. In dermatology, obtaining such datasets remains challenging due to significant variations in patient populations, illumination conditions, and acquisition system characteristics. In this work, we propose S-SYNTH, the first knowledge-based, adaptable open-source skin simulation framework to rapidly generate synthetic skin, 3D models and digitally rendered images, using an anatomically inspired multi-layer, multi-component skin and growing lesion model. The skin model allows for controlled variation in skin appearance, such as skin color, presence of hair, lesion shape, and blood fraction among other parameters. We use this framework to study the effect of possible variations on the development and evaluation of AI models for skin lesion segmentation, and show that results obtained using synthetic data follow similar comparative trends as real dermatologic images, while mitigating biases and limitations from existing datasets including small dataset size, lack of diversity, and underrepresentation.

Ghada Zamzmi, Adarsh Subbaswamy, Elena Sizikova et al.

Although interest in synthetic medical data (SMD) for training and testing AI methods is growing, the absence of a standardized framework to evaluate its quality and applicability hinders its wider adoption. Here, we outline an evaluation framework designed to meet the unique requirements of medical applications, and introduce SMD Card, which can serve as comprehensive reports that accompany artificially generated datasets. This card provides a transparent and standardized framework for evaluating and reporting the quality of synthetic data, which can benefit SMD developers, users, and regulators, particularly for AI models using SMD in regulatory submissions.