# Evaluating the plausibility of synthetic images for improving automated endoscopic stone recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.13409 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13409/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Sep 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [SwinIR: Image Restoration Using Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10257/) (2021)
- [SinGAN: Learning a Generative Model from a Single Natural Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01164/) (2019)
- [Swin2SR: SwinV2 Transformer for Compressed Image Super-Resolution and Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.11345/) (2022)
- [SinDDM: A Single Image Denoising Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16582/) (2022)
- [Towards Automatic Recognition of Pure & Mixed Stones using Intraoperative Endoscopic Digital Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.10686/) (2021)
- [Semi-supervised learning for medical image classification using imbalanced training data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08956/) (2021)
- [On the in vivo recognition of kidney stones using machine learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08865/) (2022)
- [Boosting Kidney Stone Identification in Endoscopic Images Using Two-Step Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13654/) (2022)
- [Deepchecks: A Library for Testing and Validating Machine Learning Models and Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08491/) (2022)
- [Evaluating clinical diversity and plausibility of synthetic capsule endoscopic images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.06366/) (2023)
- [A Data Augmentation Pipeline to Generate Synthetic Labeled Datasets of 3D Echocardiography Images using a GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05384/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Currently, the Morpho-Constitutional Analysis (MCA) is the de facto approach for the etiological diagnosis of kidney stone formation, and it is an important step for establishing personalized treatment to avoid relapses. More recently, research has focused on performing such tasks intra-operatively, an approach known as Endoscopic Stone Recognition (ESR). Both methods rely on features observed in the surface and the section of kidney stones to separate the analyzed samples into several sub-groups. However, given the high intra-observer variability and the complex operating conditions found in ESR, there is a lot of interest in using AI for computer-aided diagnosis. However, current AI models require large datasets to attain a good performance and for generalizing to unseen distributions. This is a major problem as large labeled datasets are very difficult to acquire, and some classes of kidney stones are very rare. Thus, in this paper, we present a method based on diffusion as a way of augmenting pre-existing ex-vivo kidney stone datasets. Our aim is to create plausible diverse kidney stone images that can be used for pre-training models using ex-vivo data. We show that by mixing natural and synthetic images of CCD images, it is possible to train models capable of performing very well on unseen intra-operative data. Our results show that is possible to attain an improvement of 10% in terms of accuracy compared to a baseline model pre-trained only on ImageNet. Moreover, our results show an improvement of 6% for surface images and 10% for section images compared to a model train on CCD images only, which demonstrates the effectiveness of using synthetic images.