Synthetic Gastritis Image Generation via Loss Function-Based Conditional PGGAN

In this paper, a novel synthetic gastritis image generation method based on a generative adversarial network (GAN) model is presented. Sharing medical image data is a crucial issue for realizing diagnostic supporting systems. However, it is still difficult for researchers to obtain medical image data since the data include individual information. Recently proposed GAN models can learn the distribution of training images without seeing real image data, and individual information can be completely anonymized by generated images. If generated images can be used as training images in medical image classification, promoting medical image analysis will become feasible. In this paper, we targeted gastritis, which is a risk factor for gastric cancer and can be diagnosed by gastric X-ray images. Instead of collecting a large amount of gastric X-ray image data, an image generation approach was adopted in our method. We newly propose loss function-based conditional progressive growing generative adversarial network (LC-PGGAN), a gastritis image generation method that can be used for a gastritis classification problem. The LC-PGGAN gradually learns the characteristics of gastritis in gastric X-ray images by adding new layers during the training step. Moreover, the LC-PGGAN employs loss function-based conditional adversarial learning so that generated images can be used as the gastritis classification task. We show that images generated by the LC-PGGAN are effective for gastritis classification using gastric X-ray images and have clinical characteristics of the target symptom.