Generalization of intensity distribution of medical images using GANs

Abstract

The performance of a CNN based medical-image classification network depends on the intensities of the trained images. Therefore, it is necessary to generalize medical images of various intensities against degradation of performance. For lesion classification, features of generalized images should be carefully maintained. To maintain the performance of the medical image classification network and minimize the loss of features, we propose a method using a generative adversarial network (GAN) as a generator to adapt the arbitrary intensity distribution to the specific intensity distribution of the training set. We also select CycleGAN and UNIT to train unpaired medical image data sets. The following was done to evaluate each method’s performance: the similarities between the generalized image and the original were measured via the structural similarity index (SSIM) and histogram, and the original domain data set was passed to a classifier that trained only the original domain images for accuracy comparisons. The results show that the performance evaluation of the generalized images is better than that of the originals, confirming that our proposed method is a simple but powerful solution to the performance degradation of a classification network.