Adversarial Augmentation for Enhancing Classification of Mammography Images

Supervised deep learning relies on the assumption that enough training data is available, which presents a problem for its application to several fields, like medical imaging. On the example of a binary image classification task (breast cancer recognition), we show that pretraining a generative model for meaningful image augmentation helps enhance the performance of the resulting classifier. By augmenting the data, performance on downstream classification tasks could be improved even with a relatively small training set. We show that this "adversarial augmentation" yields promising results compared to classical image augmentation on the example of breast cancer classification.

Lukas Jendele, Ondrej Skopek, Anton S. Becker, Ender Konukoglu · 2019