CAE SynthImgGen: Revolutionizing cancer diagnosis with convolutional autoencoder-based synthetic image generation

Medical imaging is pivotal in modern healthcare, offering a visual window into the human body’s intricate structures and functions. However, the scarcity of diverse and representative medical images significantly limits research progress. Today, deep learning algorithms are increasingly incorporated into the medical imaging domain to automate the diagnostic process. The success of these algorithms relies heavily on vast and diverse datasets. Insufficient data hampers the training and validation of these algorithms, resulting in suboptimal performance, biased results, and reduced generalizability. This paper introduces a pioneering approach that employs a Convolutional Autoencoder (CA) to synthetically generate medical images. The synthetic images produced are then added to the existing database to create an augmented dataset. This augmented dataset is subsequently used for classification with a convolutional neural network. Experiments were conducted on publicly available datasets—the chest CT-scan dataset and the IQ-OTH/NCCD lung cancer dataset. The synthetic image generation capability of the CA was compared with traditional augmentation methods such as flipping, rotating, shearing, shifting, zooming, and sub-sampling. Results showed that the CA-based augmented dataset achieved an accuracy of 91 %, compared to 83 % with the traditional augmentation-based dataset.