Acquiring large quantities of data and annotations is known to be effective for developing high-performing deep learning models, but is difficult and expensive to do in the healthcare context. Adding synthetic training data using generative models offers a low-cost method to deal effectively with the data scarcity challenge, and can also address data imbalance and patient privacy issues. In this study, we propose a comprehensive framework that fits seamlessly into model development workflows for medical image analysis. We demonstrate, with datasets of varying size, (i) the benefits of generative models as a data augmentation method; (ii) how adversarial methods can protect patient privacy via data substitution; (iii) novel performance metrics for these use cases by testing models on real holdout data. We show that training with both synthetic and real data outperforms training with real data alone, and that models trained solely with synthetic data approach their real-only counterparts. Code is available at https://github.com/Global-Health-Labs/US-DCGAN.

通过使用生成模型中的合成训练数据，本研究提出了一个全面框架，以提高医学图像分析的模型开发效果，同时解决数据稀缺、数据不平衡和患者隐私问题。通过在各种规模的数据集上进行测试，我们展示了生成模型作为数据增广方法的优势，以及通过敌对方法保护患者隐私以及使用实际留存数据进行模型测试的新型性能指标。我们证明了使用合成数据和真实数据进行训练优于仅使用真实数据进行训练，并且仅使用合成数据进行训练的模型接近仅使用真实数据进行训练的模型。

合성医学影像的质量如何？肺部超声的实证研究