Systematic review of generative adversarial networks (GANs) in cell microscopy: Trends, practices, and impact on image augmentation

Duway Nicolas Lesmes-Leon, Andreas Dengel and Sheraz Ahmed

PLOS ONE, 2025, vol. 20, issue 6, 1-35

Abstract: Cell microscopy is the main tool that allows researchers to study microorganisms and plays a key role in observing and understanding the morphology, interactions, and development of microorganisms. However, there exist limitations in both the techniques and the samples that impair the amount of available data to study. Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are a deep learning alternative to alleviate the data availability limitation by generating nonexistent samples that resemble the probability distribution of the real data. The aim of this systematic review is to find trends, common practices, and popular datasets and analyze the impact of GANs in image augmentation of cell microscopy images. We used ScienceDirect, IEEE Xplore, PubMed, bioRxiv, and arXiv to select English research articles that employed GANs to generate any kind of cell microscopy images independently of the main objective of the study. We conducted the data collection using 15 selected features from each study, which allowed us to analyze the results from different perspectives using tables and histograms. 46 studies met the legibility criteria, where 23 had image augmentation as the main task. Moreover, we retrieved 29 publicly available datasets. The results showed a lack of consensus with performance metrics, baselines, and datasets. Additionally, we evidenced the relevance of popular architectures such as StyleGAN and losses, including Vanilla and Wasserstein adversarial losses. This systematic review presents the most popular configurations to perform image augmentation. It also highlights the importance of design good practices and gold standards to guarantee comparability and reproducibility. This review implemented the ROBIS tool to assess the risk of bias, and it was not registered in PROSPERO.

Date: 2025
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0291217

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0291217

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