Tackling data scarcity: Synthetic tumour and mask generation to improve image segmentation

Given the increasing data requirements of deep learning models and the scarcity of medical imaging data, new data augmentation techniques are receiving particular attention. This paper explores the subfield of tumour synthesis within medical image generation, focusing on the development of synthetic tumours in MR images. This study introduces a novel tumour generation method using diffusion models, designed to inpaint visually convincing 3D synthetic liver tumours into real MRI volumes while generating the corresponding masks using simplex deformation. This approach has been employed successfully to inpaint images with 1000 synthetic tumours. Furthermore, it has shown significant performance improvements when applied in image segmentation tasks. In particular, our method improved the Dice coefficient by 6.7 points on the ATLAS test set without relying on external data. When combined with a pseudo-annotated external dataset, the improvement increased to 10 points. This study not only demonstrates the ability to segment tumours but also paves the way for various synthetic data-based applications in medical imaging.