Synthetic medical image generator for data augmentation and anonymisation based on generative adversarial network for glioblastoma tumors growth prediction

Abstract

Prediction methods of glioblastoma tumours growth constitute a hard task due to the lack of medical data, which is mostly related to the patients' privacy, the cost of collecting a large medical data set, and the availability of related notations by experts. In this study, the authors propose a synthetic medical image generator (SMIG) with the purpose of generating synthetic data based on the generative adversarial network in order to provide anonymised data. In addition, to predict the glioblastoma multiform tumour growth the authors developed a tumour growth predictor based on end to end convolution neural network architecture that allows training on a public data set from the cancer imaging archive (TCIA), combined with the generated synthetic data. The authors also highlighted the impact of implicating a synthetic data generated using SMIG as a data augmentation tool. Despite small data size provided by TCIA data set, the obtained results demonstrate valuable tumour growth prediction accuracy.