Towards disease-aware image editing of chest X-rays

Disease-aware image editing by means of generative adversarial networks (GANs) constitutes a promising avenue for advancing the use of AI in the healthcare sector - we present a Proof of Concept of the same. While GAN-based techniques have been successful in generating and manipulating natural images, their application to the medical domain, however, is still in its infancy. Working with the CheXpert data set, here we show that StyleGAN can be trained to generate realistic chest X-rays. Inspired by the Cyclic Reverse Generator (CRG) framework, we train an encoder that allows for faithfully inverting the generator on synthetic X-rays and provides organ-level reconstructions of real ones. Employing a guided manipulation of latent codes, we confer the medical condition of Cardiomegaly (increased heart size) onto real X-rays from healthy patients