# CellGAN: Conditional Cervical Cell Synthesis for Augmenting Cytopathological Image Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.06182 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06182/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Jul 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.11096/) (2018)
- [Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1784/) (2014)
- [Spectral Normalization for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05957/) (2018)
- [Which Training Methods for GANs do actually Converge?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04406/) (2018)
- [GCNet: Non-local Networks Meet Squeeze-Excitation Networks and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11492/) (2019)
- [cGANs with Projection Discriminator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05637/) (2018)
- [Geometric GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02894/) (2017)
- [Towards Faster and Stabilized GAN Training for High-fidelity Few-shot Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.04775/) (2021)
- [The Unusual Effectiveness of Averaging in GAN Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.04498/) (2018)
- [Selective Synthetic Augmentation with HistoGAN for Improved Histopathology Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06399/) (2021)
- [A Novel Automation-Assisted Cervical Cancer Reading Method Based on Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06649/) (2019)

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

- [Iterative Online Image Synthesis via Diffusion Model for Imbalanced Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08407/) (2024)
- [Enabling PSO-Secure Synthetic Data Sharing Using Diversity-Aware Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17975/) (2025)
- [Two-stage Cytopathological Image Synthesis for Augmenting Cervical Abnormality Screening](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14707/) (2024)
- [Phenotype-Guided Generative Model for High-Fidelity Cardiac MRI Synthesis: Advancing Pretraining and Clinical Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03426/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Automatic examination of thin-prep cytologic test (TCT) slides can assist pathologists in finding cervical abnormality for accurate and efficient cancer screening. Current solutions mostly need to localize suspicious cells and classify abnormality based on local patches, concerning the fact that whole slide images of TCT are extremely large. It thus requires many annotations of normal and abnormal cervical cells, to supervise the training of the patch-level classifier for promising performance. In this paper, we propose CellGAN to synthesize cytopathological images of various cervical cell types for augmenting patch-level cell classification. Built upon a lightweight backbone, CellGAN is equipped with a non-linear class mapping network to effectively incorporate cell type information into image generation. We also propose the Skip-layer Global Context module to model the complex spatial relationship of the cells, and attain high fidelity of the synthesized images through adversarial learning. Our experiments demonstrate that CellGAN can produce visually plausible TCT cytopathological images for different cell types. We also validate the effectiveness of using CellGAN to greatly augment patch-level cell classification performance.