Generation of realistic simulated B-mode image texture with a GAN

Abstract

The intima-media complex of the common carotid artery is considered the sentinel of a silent killer disease called atherosclerosis. Morphological biomarkers such as the intimamedia thickness are already exploitable, but dynamic biomarkers, which reflect tissue deformation over the cardiac cycle, remain to be validated. Recent motion estimation methods seek to quantify compression, shear, and elongation coefficients, but their clinical applicability has not yet been well defined, and their actual accuracy is difficult to assess due to the absence of ground truth. This lack of reference also is the main limitation to explore fully supervised deep learning methods that have shown great potential in other applications. With this in mind, we propose a simulation pipeline to produce realistic in silico sequences, by combining a physics-based simulator with a post-processing based on a generative adversarial network.