Structure-Preserving Medical Image Generation from a Latent Graph Representation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Arias, Kevin, Vargas, Edwin, Mishra, Kumar Vijay, Ortega, Antonio, Arguello, Henry
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Arias, Kevin
Vargas, Edwin
Mishra, Kumar Vijay
Ortega, Antonio
Arguello, Henry
author_facet Arias, Kevin
Vargas, Edwin
Mishra, Kumar Vijay
Ortega, Antonio
Arguello, Henry
contents Supervised learning techniques have proven their efficacy in many applications with abundant data. However, applying these methods to medical imaging is challenging due to the scarcity of data, given the high acquisition costs and intricate data characteristics of those images, thereby limiting the full potential of deep neural networks. To address the lack of data, augmentation techniques leverage geometry, color, and the synthesis ability of generative models (GMs). Despite previous efforts, gaps in the generation process limit the impact of data augmentation to improve understanding of medical images, e.g., the highly structured nature of some domains, such as X-ray images, is ignored. Current GMs rely solely on the network's capacity to blindly synthesize augmentations that preserve semantic relationships of chest X-ray images, such as anatomical restrictions, representative structures, or structural similarities consistent across datasets. In this paper, we introduce a novel GM that leverages the structural resemblance of medical images by learning a latent graph representation (LGR). We design an end-to-end model to learn (i) a LGR that captures the intrinsic structure of X-ray images and (ii) a graph convolutional network (GCN) that reconstructs the X-ray image from the LGR. We employ adversarial training to guide the generator and discriminator models in learning the distribution of the learned LGR. Using the learned GCN, our approach generates structure-preserving synthetic images by mapping generated LGRs to X-ray. Additionally, we evaluate the learned graph representation for other tasks, such as X-ray image classification and segmentation. Numerical experiments demonstrate the efficacy of our approach, increasing performance up to $3\%$ and $2\%$ for classification and segmentation, respectively.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_15920
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Structure-Preserving Medical Image Generation from a Latent Graph Representation
Arias, Kevin
Vargas, Edwin
Mishra, Kumar Vijay
Ortega, Antonio
Arguello, Henry
Image and Video Processing
Supervised learning techniques have proven their efficacy in many applications with abundant data. However, applying these methods to medical imaging is challenging due to the scarcity of data, given the high acquisition costs and intricate data characteristics of those images, thereby limiting the full potential of deep neural networks. To address the lack of data, augmentation techniques leverage geometry, color, and the synthesis ability of generative models (GMs). Despite previous efforts, gaps in the generation process limit the impact of data augmentation to improve understanding of medical images, e.g., the highly structured nature of some domains, such as X-ray images, is ignored. Current GMs rely solely on the network's capacity to blindly synthesize augmentations that preserve semantic relationships of chest X-ray images, such as anatomical restrictions, representative structures, or structural similarities consistent across datasets. In this paper, we introduce a novel GM that leverages the structural resemblance of medical images by learning a latent graph representation (LGR). We design an end-to-end model to learn (i) a LGR that captures the intrinsic structure of X-ray images and (ii) a graph convolutional network (GCN) that reconstructs the X-ray image from the LGR. We employ adversarial training to guide the generator and discriminator models in learning the distribution of the learned LGR. Using the learned GCN, our approach generates structure-preserving synthetic images by mapping generated LGRs to X-ray. Additionally, we evaluate the learned graph representation for other tasks, such as X-ray image classification and segmentation. Numerical experiments demonstrate the efficacy of our approach, increasing performance up to $3\%$ and $2\%$ for classification and segmentation, respectively.
title Structure-Preserving Medical Image Generation from a Latent Graph Representation
topic Image and Video Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15920