Generative Adversarial Networks for Neuroimage Translation

Image-to-image translation has gained popularity in the medical field to transform images from one domain to another. Medical image synthesis via domain transformation is advantageous in its ability to augment an image dataset where images for a given class are limited. From the learning perspective, this process contributes to the data-oriented robustness of the model by inherently broadening the model's exposure to more diverse visual data and enabling it to learn more generalized features. In the case of generating additional neuroimages, it is advantageous to obtain unidentifiable medical data and augment smaller annotated datasets. This study proposes the development of a cycle-consistent generative adversarial network (CycleGAN) model for translating neuroimages from one field strength to another (e.g., 3 Tesla [T] to 1.5 T). This model was compared with a model based on a deep convolutional GAN model architecture. CycleGAN was able to generate the synthetic and reconstructed images with reasonable accuracy. The mapping function from the source (3 T) to the target domain (1.5 T) performed optimally with an average peak signal-to-noise ratio value of 25.69 ± 2.49 dB and a mean absolute error value of 2106.27 ± 1218.37. The codes for this study have been made publicly available in the following GitHub repository.^a.