WGAN-GP for Synthetic Retinal Image Generation: Enhancing Sensor-Based Medical Imaging for Classification Models

Accurate synthetic image generation is crucial for addressing data scarcity challenges in medical image classification tasks, particularly in sensor-derived medical imaging. In this work, we propose a novel method using a Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Network with Gradient Penalty (WGAN-GP) and nearest-neighbor interpolation to generate high-quality synthetic images for diabetic retinopathy classification. Our approach enhances training datasets by generating realistic retinal images that retain critical pathological features. We evaluated the method across multiple retinal image datasets, including Retinal-Lesions, Fine-Grained Annotated Diabetic Retinopathy (FGADR), Indian Diabetic Retinopathy Image Dataset (IDRiD), and the Kaggle Diabetic Retinopathy dataset. The proposed method outperformed traditional generative models, such as conditional GANs and PathoGAN, achieving the best performance on key metrics: a Fréchet Inception Distance (FID) of 15.21, a Mean Squared Error (MSE) of 0.002025, and a Structural Similarity Index (SSIM) of 0.89 in the Kaggle dataset. Additionally, expert evaluations revealed that only 56.66% of synthetic images could be distinguished from real ones, demonstrating the high fidelity and clinical relevance of the generated data. These results highlight the effectiveness of our approach in improving medical image classification by generating realistic and diverse synthetic datasets.