A Comparative Study of Generative Adversarial Networks in Medical Image Processing

The rapid development of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) has transformed medical image processing, enabling realistic image synthesis, augmentation, and restoration. This study presents a comparative evaluation of three representative GAN architectures, Pix2Pix, SPADE GAN, and Wasserstein GAN (WGAN), across multiple medical imaging tasks, including segmentation, image synthesis, and enhancement. Experiments were conducted on three benchmark datasets: ACDC (cardiac MRI), Brain Tumor MRI, and CHAOS (abdominal MRI). Model performance was assessed using Fréchet Inception Distance (FID), Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), Structural Similarity Index (SSIM), Dice coefficient, and segmentation accuracy. Results show that SPADE-inpainting achieved the best image fidelity (PSNR ≈ 36 dB, SSIM > 0.97, Dice ≈ 0.94, FID < 0.01), while Pix2Pix delivered the highest segmentation accuracy (Dice ≈ 0.90 on ACDC). WGAN provided stable enhancement and strong visual sharpness on smaller datasets such as Brain Tumor MRI. The findings confirm that no single GAN architecture universally excels across all tasks; performance depends on data complexity and task objectives. Overall, GANs demonstrate strong potential for medical image augmentation and synthesis, though their clinical utility remains dependent on anatomical fidelity and dataset diversity.