Generative Adversarial Network in Medical Imaging: A Review

Generative adversarial networks have gained a lot of attention in general computer vision community due to their capability of data generation without explicitly modelling the probability density function and robustness to overfitting. The adversarial loss brought by the discriminator provides a clever way of incorporating unlabeled samples into the training and imposing higher order consistency that is proven to be useful in many cases, such as in domain adaptation, data augmentation, and image-to-image translation. These nice properties have attracted researcher in the medical imaging community and we have seen quick adoptions in many traditional tasks and some novel applications. This trend will continue to grow based on our observation, therefore we conducted a review of the recent advances in medical imaging using the adversarial training scheme in the hope of benefiting researchers that are interested in this technique.