3-D PET Image Generation with Tumour Masks using TGAN

Training computer-vision related algorithms on medical images for disease diagnosis or image segmentation is difficult due to the lack of training data, labeled samples, and privacy concerns. For this reason, a robust generative method to create synthetic data is highly sought after. However, most three-dimensional image generators require additional image input or are extremely memory intensive. To address these issues we propose adapting video generation techniques for 3-D image generation. Using the temporal GAN (TGAN) architecture, we show we are able to generate realistic head and neck PET images. We also show that by conditioning the generator on tumour masks, we are able to control the geometry and location of the tumour in the generated images. To test the utility of the synthetic images, we train a segmentation model using the synthetic images. Synthetic images conditioned on real tumour masks are automatically segmented, and the corresponding real images are also segmented. We evaluate the segmentations using the Dice score and find the segmentation algorithm performs similarly on both datasets (0.65 synthetic data, 0.70 real data). We also perform data augmentation experiments to evaluate how synthetic data may be used to improve segmentation model performance. Our findings show that augmenting small datasets with synthetic data results in higher segmentation Dice scores.