Realistic image synthesis of COVID-19 chest X-rays using depthwise boundary equilibrium generative adversarial networks

Abstract

Researchers in various related fields research preventing and controlling the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) virus. The spread of the COVID-19 is increasing exponentially and infecting humans massively. Preliminary detection can be observed by looking at abnormal conditions in the airways, thus allowing the entry of the virus into the patient's respiratory tract, which can be represented using computer tomography (CT) scan and chest X-ray (CXR) imaging. Particular deep learning approaches have been developed to classify COVID-19 CT or CXR images such as convolutional neural network (CNN), and deep convolutional neural network (DCNN). However, COVID-19 CXR dataset was measly opened and accessed. Particular deep learning method performance can be improved by augmenting the dataset amount. Therefore, the COVID-19 CXR dataset was possibly augmented by generating the synthetic image. This study discusses a fast and real-like image synthesis approach, namely depthwise boundary equilibrium generative adversarial network (DepthwiseBEGAN). DepthwiseBEGAN was reduced memory load 70.11% in training processes compared to the conventional BEGAN. DepthwiseBEGAN synthetic images were inspected by measuring the Fréchet inception distance (FID) score with the real-to-real score equal to 4.3866 and real-to-fake score equal to 4.4674. Moreover, generated DepthwiseBEGAN synthetic images improve 22.59% accuracy of conventional CNN models.