# Self-supervised Brain Lesion Generation for Effective Data Augmentation of Medical Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.14826 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14826/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Prototypical Networks for Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05175/) (2017)
- [Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.11096/) (2018)
- [Attention U-Net: Learning Where to Look for the Pancreas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03999/) (2018)
- [Adversarial Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.05644/) (2015)
- [Prototype-Sample Relation Distillation: Towards Replay-Free Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14771/) (2023)
- [Shifts 2.0: Extending The Dataset of Real Distributional Shifts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.15407/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Accurate brain lesion delineation is important for planning neurosurgical treatment. Automatic brain lesion segmentation methods based on convolutional neural networks have demonstrated remarkable performance. However, neural network performance is constrained by the lack of large-scale well-annotated training datasets. In this manuscript, we propose a comprehensive framework to efficiently generate new samples for training a brain lesion segmentation model. We first train a lesion generator, based on an adversarial autoencoder, in a self-supervised manner. Next, we utilize a novel image composition algorithm, Soft Poisson Blending, to seamlessly combine synthetic lesions and brain images to obtain training samples. Finally, to effectively train the brain lesion segmentation model with augmented images we introduce a new prototype consistence regularization to align real and synthetic features. Our framework is validated by extensive experiments on two public brain lesion segmentation datasets: ATLAS v2.0 and Shift MS. Our method outperforms existing brain image data augmentation schemes. For instance, our method improves the Dice from 50.36% to 60.23% compared to the U-Net with conventional data augmentation techniques for the ATLAS v2.0 dataset.