# CT-SGAN: Computed Tomography Synthesis GAN

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.09288 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.09288/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Oct 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10196/) (2017)
- [Improved Techniques for Training GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03498/) (2016)
- [Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1784/) (2014)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning with Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06434/) (2015)
- [SqueezeNet: AlexNet-level accuracy with 50x fewer parameters and <0.5MB model size](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07360/) (2016)
- [Deep Reinforcement Learning that Matters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.06560/) (2017)
- [Which Training Methods for GANs do actually Converge?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04406/) (2018)
- [StackGAN: Text to Photo-realistic Image Synthesis with Stacked Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03242/) (2016)
- [MoCoGAN: Decomposing Motion and Content for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.04993/) (2017)
- [NIPS 2016 Tutorial: Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.00160/) (2016)
- [Medical Image Synthesis for Data Augmentation and Anonymization using Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10225/) (2018)
- [Medical Image Synthesis with Context-Aware Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.05362/) (2016)
- [How to Fool Radiologists with Generative Adversarial Networks? A Visual Turing Test for Lung Cancer Diagnosis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09762/) (2017)
- [CT-Realistic Lung Nodule Simulation from 3D Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks for Robust Lung Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.04051/) (2018)
- [CT-GAN: Malicious Tampering of 3D Medical Imagery using Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.03597/) (2019)
- [Dual Adversarial Inference for Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05324/) (2019)
- [TrajectoryNet: An Embedded GPS Trajectory Representation for Point-based Classification Using Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02636/) (2017)
- [One Single Deep Bidirectional LSTM Network for Word Sense Disambiguation of Text Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.09059/) (2018)
- [Chest CT Super-resolution and Domain-adaptation using Memory-efficient 3D Reversible GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.00295/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Generative AI for Synthetic Data Across Multiple Medical Modalities: A Systematic Review of Recent Developments and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00116/) (2024)
- [FakeNews: GAN-based generation of realistic 3D volumetric data -- A systematic review and taxonomy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01390/) (2022)
- [Foundation VAEs for 3D CT Reconstruction, Augmentation, and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30893/) (2026)
- [Comparative clinical evaluation of "memory-efficient" synthetic 3d generative adversarial networks (gan) head-to-head to state of art: results on computed tomography of the chest](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15572/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Diversity in data is critical for the successful training of deep learning models. Leveraged by a recurrent generative adversarial network, we propose the CT-SGAN model that generates large-scale 3D synthetic CT-scan volumes (≥ 224×224×224) when trained on a small dataset of chest CT-scans. CT-SGAN offers an attractive solution to two major challenges facing machine learning in medical imaging: a small number of given i.i.d. training data, and the restrictions around the sharing of patient data preventing to rapidly obtain larger and more diverse datasets. We evaluate the fidelity of the generated images qualitatively and quantitatively using various metrics including Fr'echet Inception Distance and Inception Score. We further show that CT-SGAN can significantly improve lung nodule detection accuracy by pre-training a classifier on a vast amount of synthetic data.