Gan-based data augmentation to improve breast ultrasound and mammography mass classification

Abstract

Data imbalance is a common problem in breast cancer diagnosis, to address this challenge, the research explores the use of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to generate synthetic medical data. Various GAN methods, including Wasserstein GAN with Gradient Penalty (WGAN-GP), Cycle GAN, Conditional GAN, and Spectral Normalization GAN (SNGAN), were tested for data augmentation in breast regions of interest (ROIs) using mammography and ultrasound databases. The study employed real, synthetic, and hybrid ROIs (128x128 pixels) to train a Resnet network for classifying as benign (B) or malignant (M) classes. The quality and diversity of the synthetic data were assessed using several metrics: Fréchet Inception Distance (FID), Kernel Inception Distance (KID), Structural Similarity Index (SSIM), Multi-Scale SSIM (MS-SSIM), Blind Reference Image Spatial Quality Evaluator (BRISQUE), Naturalness Image Quality Evaluator (NIQE), and Perception-based Image Quality Evaluator (PIQE).Results revealed that the SNGAN model (FID = 52.89) was most effective for augmenting mammography data, while CGAN (FID = 116.03) excelled with ultrasound data. Cycle GAN and WGAN-GP, though demonstrating lower KID values, did not perform better than SNGAN and CGAN. The lower average MS-SSIM values suggested that SNGAN and CGAN produced a high diversity of synthetic images. However, lower SSIM, BRISQUE, NIQE, and PIQE values indicated poor quality in both real and synthetic images. Classification results showed high accuracy without data augmentation in both US (93.1 %B/94.9 %M) and mammography (80.9 %B/76.9 %M). The research concludes that preprocessing and characterizing ROIs by abnormality type is crucial to generate diverse synthetic data and improve accuracy in the classification process using combined GANs and CNN models.