Synthesis of brain tumor multicontrast MR images for improved data augmentation

Abstract

Purpose Medical image analysis using deep neural networks has been actively studied. For accurate training of deep neural networks, the learning data should be sufficient and have good quality and generalized characteristics. However, in medical images, it is difficult to acquire sufficient patient data because of the difficulty of patient recruitment, the burden of annotation of lesions by experts, and the invasion of patients' privacy. In comparison, the medical images of healthy volunteers can be easily acquired. To resolve this data bias problem, the proposed method synthesizes brain tumor images from normal brain images. Methods Our method can synthesize a huge number of brain tumor multicontrast MR images from numerous healthy brain multicontrast MR images and various concentric circles. Because tumors have complex characteristics, the proposed method simplifies them into concentric circles that are easily controllable. Then, it converts the concentric circles into various realistic tumor masks through deep neural networks. The tumor masks are used to synthesize realistic brain tumor images from normal brain images. Results We performed a qualitative and quantitative analysis to assess the usefulness of augmented data from the proposed method. Data augmentation by the proposed method provided significant improvements to tumor segmentation compared with other GAN-based methods. Intuitive experimental results are available online at . Conclusions The proposed method can control the grade tumor masks by the concentric circles, and synthesize realistic brain tumor multicontrast MR images. In terms of data augmentation, the proposed method can successfully synthesize brain tumor images that can be used to train tumor segmentation networks or other deep neural networks.