Improving COVID-19 CXR Detection with Synthetic Data Augmentation

Abstract: Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers have developed deep learning models to classify COVID-19 induced pneumonia. As with many medical imaging tasks, the quality and quantity of the available data is often limited. In this work we train a deep learning model on publicly available COVID-19 image data and evaluate the model on local hospital chest X-ray data. The data has been reviewed and labeled by two radiologists to ensure a high quality estimation of the generalization capabilities of the model. Furthermore, we are using a Generative Adversarial Network to generate synthetic X-ray images based on this data. Our results show that using those synthetic images for data augmentation can improve the model's performance significantly. This can be a promising approach for many sparse data domains.