Controllable cardiac synthesis via disentangled anatomy arithmetic

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel framework called disentangled anatomy arithmetic for controllable cardiac image synthesis, enabling targeted data augmentation to improve medical image analysis tasks.

Contribution

It proposes a disentangled anatomy arithmetic method that combines anatomical factors for realistic image generation and data augmentation in cardiac imaging.

Findings

Generated images improve classification accuracy.

Enhanced segmentation performance with augmented data.

Model effectively disentangles anatomy and imaging factors.

Abstract

Acquiring annotated data at scale with rare diseases or conditions remains a challenge. It would be extremely useful to have a method that controllably synthesizes images that can correct such underrepresentation. Assuming a proper latent representation, the idea of a "latent vector arithmetic" could offer the means of achieving such synthesis. A proper representation must encode the fidelity of the input data, preserve invariance and equivariance, and permit arithmetic operations. Motivated by the ability to disentangle images into spatial anatomy (tensor) factors and accompanying imaging (vector) representations, we propose a framework termed "disentangled anatomy arithmetic", in which a generative model learns to combine anatomical factors of different input images such that when they are re-entangled with the desired imaging modality (e.g. MRI), plausible new cardiac images are created with the target characteristics. To encourage a realistic combination of anatomy factors after the arithmetic step, we propose a localized noise injection network that precedes the generator. Our model is used to generate realistic images, pathology labels, and segmentation masks that are used to augment the existing datasets and subsequently improve post-hoc classification and segmentation tasks. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/vios-s/DAA-GAN.