Data Augmentation For Medical MR Image Using Generative Adversarial Networks

Computer-assisted diagnosis (CAD) based on deep learning has become a crucial diagnostic technology in the medical industry, effectively improving diagnosis accuracy. However, the scarcity of brain tumor Magnetic Resonance (MR) image datasets causes the low performance of deep learning algorithms. The distribution of transformed images generated by traditional data augmentation (DA) intrinsically resembles the original ones, resulting in a limited performance in terms of generalization ability. This work improves Progressive Growing of GANs with a structural similarity loss function (PGGAN-SSIM) to solve image blurriness problems and model collapse. We also explore other GAN-based data augmentation to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model. Our results show that PGGAN-SSIM successfully generates 256x256 realistic brain tumor MR images which fill the real image distribution uncovered by the original dataset. Furthermore, PGGAN-SSIM exceeds other GAN-based methods, achieving promising performance improvement in Frechet Inception Distance (FID) and Multi-scale Structural Similarity (MS-SSIM).