Insights and Considerations in Development and Performance Evaluation of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs): What Radiologists Need to Know

Abstract

The rapid development of deep learning in medical imaging has significantly enhanced the capabilities of artificial intelligence while simultaneously introducing challenges, including the need for vast amounts of training data and the labor-intensive tasks of labeling and segmentation. Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have emerged as a solution, offering synthetic image generation for data augmentation and streamlining medical image processing tasks through models such as cGAN, CycleGAN, and StyleGAN. These innovations not only improve the efficiency of image augmentation, reconstruction, and segmentation, but also pave the way for unsupervised anomaly detection, markedly reducing the reliance on labeled datasets. Our investigation into GANs in medical imaging addresses their varied architectures, the considerations for selecting appropriate GAN models, and the nuances of model training and performance evaluation. This paper aims to provide radiologists who are new to GAN technology with a thorough understanding, guiding them through the practical application and evaluation of GANs in brain imaging with two illustrative examples using CycleGAN and pixel2style2pixel (pSp)-combined StyleGAN. It offers a comprehensive exploration of the transformative potential of GANs in medical imaging research. Ultimately, this paper strives to equip radiologists with the knowledge to effectively utilize GANs, encouraging further research and application within the field.