SAFRON: Stitching Across the Frontier for Generating Colorectal Cancer Histology Images

Synthetic images can be used for the development and evaluation of deep learning algorithms in the context of limited availability of annotations. In the field of computational pathology where histology images are large and visual context is crucial, synthesis of large tissue images via generative modeling is a challenging task due to memory and computing constraints hindering the generation of large images. To address this challenge, we propose a novel framework named as SAFRON to construct realistic large tissue image tiles from ground truth annotations while preserving morphological features and with minimal boundary artifacts at the seams. To this end, we train the proposed SAFRON framework based on conditional generative adversarial networks on large tissue image tiles from the Colorectal Adenocarcinoma Gland (CRAG) and DigestPath datasets. We demonstrate that our model can generate high quality and realistic image tiles of arbitrary large size after training it on relatively small image patches. We also show that training on synthetic data generated by SAFRON can significantly boost the performance of a standard algorithm for gland segmentation of colorectal cancer tissue images. Sample high resolution images generated using SAFRON are available at the URL:https://warwick.ac.uk/TIALab/SAFRON