A Multi-Stage GAN for Multi-Organ Chest X-ray Image Generation and Segmentation

Giorgio Ciano, Paolo Andreini, Tommaso Mazzierli, Monica Bianchini and Franco Scarselli
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Giorgio Ciano: Department of Information Engineering, University of Florence, 50121 Florence, Italy
Paolo Andreini: Department of Information Engineering and Mathematics, University of Siena, 53100 Siena, Italy
Tommaso Mazzierli: Department of Nephrology, AOU Careggi, University of Florence, 50121 Florence, Italy
Monica Bianchini: Department of Information Engineering and Mathematics, University of Siena, 53100 Siena, Italy
Franco Scarselli: Department of Information Engineering and Mathematics, University of Siena, 53100 Siena, Italy

Mathematics, 2021, vol. 9, issue 22, 1-16

Abstract: Multi-organ segmentation of X-ray images is of fundamental importance for computer aided diagnosis systems. However, the most advanced semantic segmentation methods rely on deep learning and require a huge amount of labeled images, which are rarely available due to both the high cost of human resources and the time required for labeling. In this paper, we present a novel multi-stage generation algorithm based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) that can produce synthetic images along with their semantic labels and can be used for data augmentation. The main feature of the method is that, unlike other approaches, generation occurs in several stages, which simplifies the procedure and allows it to be used on very small datasets. The method was evaluated on the segmentation of chest radiographic images, showing promising results. The multi-stage approach achieves state-of-the-art and, when very few images are used to train the GANs, outperforms the corresponding single-stage approach.

Keywords: deep learning; convolutional neural networks; semantic segmentation; generative adversarial networks; chest X-ray; image augmentation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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