Data Augmentation Effect of StyleGAN-Generated Images in Deep Neural Network Training for Medical Image Classification

In this paper, we examine the effectiveness of StyleGAN-generated images for data augmentation in training deep neural networks for medical image classification. We apply StyleGAN data augmentation to train VGG-16 networks for pneumonia diagnosis from chest X-ray images and focal liver lesion classification from abdominal CT images. Through quantitative and qualitative analyses, our experiments reveal that StyleGAN data augmentation expands the outer class boundaries in the feature space. Thanks to this expansion characteristics, the StyleGAN data augmentation can enhance classification performance when properly combined with real training images.