Improving Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease Classification Performance With Latent Diffusion Models
This work addresses the challenge of data scarcity for medical professionals in diagnosing NAFLD, but it is incremental as it applies an existing synthetic data method to a specific domain.
The research tackled the problem of limited annotated medical images for nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) classification by using synthetic images from diffusion models to augment real data, achieving a maximum ROC AUC of 0.904 in low-data settings.
Integrating deep learning with clinical expertise holds great potential for addressing healthcare challenges and empowering medical professionals with improved diagnostic tools. However, the need for annotated medical images is often an obstacle to leveraging the full power of machine learning models. Our research demonstrates that by combining synthetic images, generated using diffusion models, with real images, we can enhance nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) classification performance even in low-data regime settings. We evaluate the quality of the synthetic images by comparing two metrics: Inception Score (IS) and Fréchet Inception Distance (FID), computed on diffusion- and generative adversarial network (GAN)-generated images. Our results show superior performance for the diffusion-generated images, with a maximum IS score of $1.90$ compared to $1.67$ for GANs, and a minimum FID score of $69.45$ compared to $100.05$ for GANs. Utilizing a partially frozen CNN backbone (EfficientNet v1), our synthetic augmentation method achieves a maximum image-level ROC AUC of $0.904$ on a NAFLD prediction task.