Papers › GANs for Medical Image Synthesis: An Empirical Study

GANs for Medical Image Synthesis: An Empirical Study

11 May 2021arXiv:2105.05318archive 2025-07-28

Youssef Skandarani, Pierre-Marc Jodoin, Alain Lalande

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have become increasingly powerful, generating mind-blowing photorealistic images that mimic the content of datasets they were trained to replicate. One recurrent theme in medical imaging is whether GANs can also be effective at generating workable medical data as they are for generating realistic RGB images. In this paper, we perform a multi-GAN and multi-application study to gauge the benefits of GANs in medical imaging. We tested various GAN architectures from basic DCGAN to more sophisticated style-based GANs on three medical imaging modalities and organs namely : cardiac cine-MRI, liver CT and RGB retina images. GANs were trained on well-known and widely utilized datasets from which their FID score were computed to measure the visual acuity of their generated images. We further tested their usefulness by measuring the segmentation accuracy of a U-Net trained on these generated images. Results reveal that GANs are far from being equal as some are ill-suited for medical imaging applications while others are much better off. The top-performing GANs are capable of generating realistic-looking medical images by FID standards that can fool trained experts in a visual Turing test and comply to some metrics. However, segmentation results suggests that no GAN is capable of reproducing the full richness of a medical datasets.

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Tasks

Image GenerationMedical Image Generation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Medical Image Generation ACDC StyleGAN FID 24.74 #3 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Medical Image Generation SLIVER07 StyleGAN FID 29.06 #3 of 3 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

Batch NormalizationConcatenated Skip ConnectionConvolutionDCGANMax PoolingReLUU-Net

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