CycleGAN generated pneumonia chest x-ray images: Evaluation with vision transformer

Abstract

The use of generative models in image synthesis has become increasingly prevalent. Synthetic medical imaging data is of paramount importance, primarily because medical imaging data is scarce, costly, and encumbered by legal considerations pertaining to patient confidentiality. Synthetic medical images offer a potential answer to these issues. The predominant approaches primarily assess the quality of images and the degree of resemblance between these images and the original ones employed for their generation.The central idea of the work can be summarized in the question: Do the performance metrics of Frechet Inception Distance(FID) and Inception Score(IS) in the Cycle-consistent Generative Adversarial Networks (CycleGAN) model are adequate to determine how real a generated chest x-ray pneumonia image is? In this study, a CycleGAN model was employed to produce artificial images depicting 3 classes of chest x-ray pneumonia images: general(any type), bacterial, and viral pneumonia. The quality of the images were evaluated assessing and contrasting 3 criteria: performance metric of CycleGAN model, clinical assessment of respiratory experts and the results of classification of a visual transformer(ViT). The overall results showed that the evaluation metrics of the CycleGAN are insufficient to establish realism in generated medical images.