Blood Vessel Geometry Synthesis using Generative Adversarial Networks
This work addresses the need for realistic synthetic data in medical imaging, specifically for coronary arteries, but it is incremental as it applies an existing GAN method to a new domain.
The authors tackled the problem of generating synthetic blood vessel geometries for medical training and evaluation by proposing a Wasserstein GAN, which successfully synthesized plausible coronary artery geometries from a dataset of 4,412 real examples, with qualitative analysis showing strong similarities to real vessels.
Computationally synthesized blood vessels can be used for training and evaluation of medical image analysis applications. We propose a deep generative model to synthesize blood vessel geometries, with an application to coronary arteries in cardiac CT angiography (CCTA). In the proposed method, a Wasserstein generative adversarial network (GAN) consisting of a generator and a discriminator network is trained. While the generator tries to synthesize realistic blood vessel geometries, the discriminator tries to distinguish synthesized geometries from those of real blood vessels. Both real and synthesized blood vessel geometries are parametrized as 1D signals based on the central vessel axis. The generator can optionally be provided with an attribute vector to synthesize vessels with particular characteristics. The GAN was optimized using a reference database with parametrizations of 4,412 real coronary artery geometries extracted from CCTA scans. After training, plausible coronary artery geometries could be synthesized based on random vectors sampled from a latent space. A qualitative analysis showed strong similarities between real and synthesized coronary arteries. A detailed analysis of the latent space showed that the diversity present in coronary artery anatomy was accurately captured by the generator. Results show that Wasserstein generative adversarial networks can be used to synthesize blood vessel geometries.