A Data Augmentation Pipeline to Generate Synthetic Labeled Datasets of 3D Echocardiography Images Using a GAN

Due to privacy issues and limited amount of publicly available labeled datasets in the domain of medical imaging, we propose an image generation pipeline to synthesize 3D echocardiographic images with corresponding ground truth labels, to alleviate the need for data collection and for laborious and error-prone human labeling of images for subsequent Deep Learning (DL) tasks. The proposed method utilizes detailed anatomical segmentations of the heart as ground truth label sources. This initial dataset is combined with a second dataset made up of real 3D echocardiographic images to train a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to synthesize realistic 3D cardiovascular ultrasound images paired with ground truth labels. To generate the synthetic 3D dataset, the trained GAN uses high resolution anatomical models from Computed Tomography (CT) as input. A qualitative analysis of the synthesized images showed that the main structures of the heart are well delineated and closely follow the labels obtained from the anatomical models. To assess the usability of these synthetic images for DL tasks, segmentation algorithms were trained to delineate the left ventricle, left atrium, and myocardium. A quantitative analysis of the 3D segmentations given by the models trained with the synthetic images indicated the potential use of this GAN approach to generate 3D synthetic data, use the data to train DL models for different clinical tasks, and therefore tackle the problem of scarcity of 3D labeled echocardiography datasets.