DeepSynthBody: the beginning of the end for data deficiency in medicine
Vajira Thambawita, Steven A. Hicks, Jonas L. Isaksen, Mette H. Stensen, Trine B. Haugen, Jørgen K. Kanters, Sravanthi Parasa, Thomas de Lange, Håvard D. Johansen, Dag Johansen, Hugo L. Hammer, Pål Halvorsen, Michael A. Riegler
Abstract
Limited access to medical data is a barrier on developing new and efficient machine learning solutions in medicine such as computer-aided diagnosis, risk assessments, predicting optimal treatments and home-based personal healthcare systems. This paper presents DeepSynthBody: a novel framework that overcomes some of the inherent restrictions and limitations of medical data by using deep generative adversarial networks to produce synthetic data with characteristics similar to the real data, so-called DeepSynth (deep synthetic) data. We show that DeepSynthBody can address two key issues commonly associated with medical data, namely privacy concerns (as a result of data protection rules and regulations) and the high costs of annotations. To demonstrate the full pipeline of applying DeepSynthBody concepts and user-friendly functionalities, we also describe a synthetic medical dataset generated and published using our framework. DeepSynthBody opens a new era of machine learning applications in medicine with a synthetic model of the human body.