Towards disease-aware image editing of chest X-rays
This work addresses the need for AI tools in healthcare to simulate medical conditions for training or analysis, but it is incremental as it builds on existing GAN frameworks for a specific domain.
The paper tackled the problem of disease-aware image editing for chest X-rays using GANs, demonstrating that StyleGAN can generate realistic X-rays and an encoder can manipulate latent codes to confer cardiomegaly onto healthy patient images, as a proof of concept presented at a NeurIPS workshop.
Disease-aware image editing by means of generative adversarial networks (GANs) constitutes a promising avenue for advancing the use of AI in the healthcare sector. Here, we present a proof of concept of this idea. While GAN-based techniques have been successful in generating and manipulating natural images, their application to the medical domain, however, is still in its infancy. Working with the CheXpert data set, we show that StyleGAN can be trained to generate realistic chest X-rays. Inspired by the Cyclic Reverse Generator (CRG) framework, we train an encoder that allows for faithfully inverting the generator on synthetic X-rays and provides organ-level reconstructions of real ones. Employing a guided manipulation of latent codes, we confer the medical condition of cardiomegaly (increased heart size) onto real X-rays from healthy patients. This work was presented in the Medical Imaging meets Neurips Workshop 2020, which was held as part of the 34th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2020) in Vancouver, Canada