Comparative Analysis of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks for Detecting Medical Image Deepfakes

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have exhibited noteworthy advancements across various applications, including medical imaging. While numerous state-of-the-art Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) architectures are renowned for their proficient feature extraction, this paper investigates their efficacy in the context of medical image deepfake detection. The primary objective is to effectively distinguish real from tampered or manipulated medical images by employing a comprehensive evaluation of 13 state-of-the-art DCNNs. Performance is assessed across diverse evaluation metrics, encompassing considerations of time efficiency and computational resource requirements. Our findings reveal that ResNet50V2 excels in precision and specificity, whereas DenseNet169 is distinguished by its accuracy, recall, and F1-score. We investigate the specific scenarios in which one model would be more favorable than another. Additionally, MobileNetV3Large offers competitive performance, emerging as the swiftest among the considered DCNN models while maintaining a relatively small parameter count. We also assess the latent space separability quality across the examined DCNNs, showing superiority in both the DenseNet and EfficientNet model families and entailing a higher understanding of medical image deepfakes. The experimental analysis in this research contributes valuable insights to the field of deepfake image detection in the medical imaging domain.