Local Lesion Generation is Effective for Capsule Endoscopy Image Data Augmentation in a Limited Data Setting

TL;DR

This paper introduces two novel local lesion generation methods for augmenting small capsule endoscopy datasets, significantly improving classification performance by combining classical image editing with a fine-tuned Image Inpainting GAN.

Contribution

It presents the first application of a fine-tuned Image Inpainting GAN for medical data augmentation and demonstrates that combining GAN-based and classical techniques enhances lesion classification accuracy.

Findings

Achieved a macro F1-score of 33.07%, surpassing previous best by 7.84 p.p.

Demonstrated the effectiveness of local lesion generation in limited data settings.

Combined methods outperform individual approaches in capsule endoscopy classification.

Abstract

Limited medical imaging datasets challenge deep learning models by increasing risks of overfitting and reduced generalization, particularly in Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), where discriminators may overfit, leading to training divergence. This constraint also impairs classification models trained on small datasets. Generative Data Augmentation (GDA) addresses this by expanding training datasets with synthetic data, although it requires training a generative model. We propose and evaluate two local lesion generation approaches to address the challenge of augmenting small medical image datasets. The first approach employs the Poisson Image Editing algorithm, a classical image processing technique, to create realistic image composites that outperform current state-of-the-art methods. The second approach introduces a novel generative method, leveraging a fine-tuned Image Inpainting GAN to synthesize realistic lesions within specified regions of real training images. A comprehensive comparison of the two proposed methods demonstrates that effective local lesion generation in a data-constrained setting allows for reaching new state-of-the-art results in capsule endoscopy lesion classification. Combination of our techniques achieves a macro F1-score of 33.07%, surpassing the previous best result by 7.84 percentage points (p.p.) on the highly imbalanced Kvasir Capsule Dataset, a benchmark for capsule endoscopy. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to apply a fine-tuned Image Inpainting GAN for GDA in medical imaging, demonstrating that an image-conditional GAN can be adapted effectively to limited datasets to generate high-quality examples, facilitating effective data augmentation. Additionally, we show that combining this GAN-based approach with classical image processing techniques further improves the results.