# Image Synthesis as a Pretext for Unsupervised Histopathological Diagnosis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.13797 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13797/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 22 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Apr 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10196/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning with Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06434/) (2015)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Anomaly Detection with Generative Adversarial Networks to Guide Marker Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05921/) (2017)
- [GANomaly: Semi-Supervised Anomaly Detection via Adversarial Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06725/) (2018)
- [Deep Autoencoding Models for Unsupervised Anomaly Segmentation in Brain MR Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04488/) (2018)
- [Skip-GANomaly: Skip Connected and Adversarially Trained Encoder-Decoder Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08954/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Anomaly Detection from Contaminated Image Data using Simultaneous Encoder Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11034/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Anomaly Detection in Medical Imaging -- A Mini Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11986/) (2021)
- [Self-Supervised Representation Learning using Visual Field Expansion on Digital Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.03299/) (2021)
- [AI-based Anomaly Detection for Clinical-Grade Histopathological Diagnostics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14866/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Anomaly detection in visual data refers to the problem of differentiating abnormal appearances from normal cases. Supervised approaches have been successfully applied to different domains, but require an abundance of labeled data. Due to the nature of how anomalies occur and their underlying generating processes, it is hard to characterize and label them. Recent advances in deep generative-based models have sparked interest in applying such methods for unsupervised anomaly detection and have shown promising results in medical and industrial inspection domains. In this work we evaluate a crucial part of the unsupervised visual anomaly detection pipeline, that is needed for normal appearance modeling, as well as the ability to reconstruct closest looking normal and tumor samples. We adapt and evaluate different high-resolution state-of-the-art generative models from the face synthesis domain and demonstrate their superiority over currently used approaches on a challenging domain of digital pathology. Multifold improvement in image synthesis is demonstrated in terms of the quality and resolution of the generated images, validated also against the supervised model.