Data augmentation of ultrasound imaging for non-invasive white blood cell in vitro peritoneal dialysis

The limited amount of data in the healthcare domain and the necessity of training samples for increased performance of deep learning models is a recurrent challenge, especially in medical imaging. Newborn Solutions aims to enhance its non-invasive white blood cell counting device, Neosonics, by creating synthetic in vitro ultrasound images to facilitate a more efficient image generation process. This study addresses the data scarcity issue by designing and evaluating a continuous scalar conditional Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to augment in vitro peritoneal dialysis ultrasound images, increasing both the volume and variability of training samples. The developed GAN architecture incorporates novel design features: varying kernel sizes in the generator’s transposed convolutional layers and a latent intermediate space, projecting noise and condition values for enhanced image resolution and specificity. The experimental results show that the GAN successfully generated diverse images of high visual quality, closely resembling real ultrasound samples. While visual results were promising, the use of GAN-based data augmentation did not consistently improve the performance of an image regressor in distinguishing features specific to varied white blood cell concentrations. Ultimately, while this continuous scalar conditional GAN model made strides in generating realistic images, further work is needed to achieve consistent gains in regression tasks, aiming for robust model generalization.