WG 2 AN: Synthetic wound image generation using generative adversarial network

Abstract In part due to its ability to mimic any data distribution, Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) algorithms have been successfully applied to many applications, such as data augmentation, text‐to‐image translation, image‐to‐image translation, and image inpainting. Learning from data without crafting loss functions for each application provides broader applicability of the GAN algorithm. Medical image synthesis is also another field that the GAN algorithm has great potential to assist clinician training. This paper proposes a synthetic wound image generation model based on GAN architecture to increase the quality of clinical training. The proposed model is trained on chronic wound datasets with various sizes taken from real hospital environments. Hyperparameters such as epoch count and dataset size for training tasks are studied to find optimum training conditions as well. The performance of the developed model was evaluated through a mean squared error (MSE) metric to determine the similarity between generated and actual wounds. Visual inspection is performed to examine generated wound images. The results show that the proposed synthetic wound image generation (WG 2 AN) model has great potential to be used in medical training and performs well in producing synthetic wound images with a 1000‐image training dataset and 200 epochs of training.