Unsupervised GAN epoch selection for biomedical data synthesis

Abstract

Abstract Supervised Neural Networks are used for segmentation in many biological and biomedical applications. To omit the time-consuming and tiring process of manual labeling, unsupervised Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) can be used to synthesize labeled data. However, the training of GANs requires extensive computation and is often unstable. Due to the lack of established stopping criteria, GANs are usually trained multiple times for a heuristically fixed number of epochs. Early stopping and epoch selection can lead to better synthetic datasets resulting in higher downstream segmentation quality on biological or medical data. This article examines whether the Frechet Inception Distance (FID), the Kernel Inception Distance (KID), or the WeightWatcher tool can be used for early stopping or epoch selection of unsupervised GANs. The experiments show that the last trained GAN epoch is not necessarily the best one to synthesize downstream segmentation data. On complex datasets, FID and KID correlate with the downstream segmentation quality, and both can be used for epoch selection.