High-Resolution Mammogram Synthesis using Progressive Generative Adversarial Networks
This work addresses data augmentation and visualization needs in medical imaging, particularly for mammograms, but is incremental as it applies an existing GAN method to a specific domain.
The paper tackled the challenge of generating realistic, high-resolution synthetic mammograms by using progressively trained GANs, achieving synthesis at up to 1280x1024 pixels, the highest resolution for medical image synthesis.
The ability to generate synthetic medical images is useful for data augmentation, domain transfer, and out-of-distribution detection. However, generating realistic, high-resolution medical images is challenging, particularly for Full Field Digital Mammograms (FFDM), due to the textural heterogeneity, fine structural details and specific tissue properties. In this paper, we explore the use of progressively trained generative adversarial networks (GANs) to synthesize mammograms, overcoming the underlying instabilities when training such adversarial models. This work is the first to show that generation of realistic synthetic medical images is feasible at up to 1280x1024 pixels, the highest resolution achieved for medical image synthesis, enabling visualizations within standard mammographic hanging protocols. We hope this work can serve as a useful guide and facilitate further research on GANs in the medical imaging domain.