Proportional Sensitivity in Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)-Augmented Brain Tumor Classification Using Convolutional Neural Network

Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) have shown potential in expanding limited medical imaging datasets. This study explores how different ratios of GAN-generated and real brain tumor MRI images impact the performance of a CNN in classifying healthy vs. tumorous scans. A DCGAN was used to create synthetic images which were mixed with real ones at various ratios to train a custom CNN. The CNN was then evaluated on a separate real-world test set. Our results indicate that the model maintains high sensitivity and precision in tumor classification, even when trained predominantly on synthetic data. When only a small portion of GAN data was added, such as 900 real images and 100 GAN images, the model achieved excellent performance, with test accuracy reaching 95.2%, and precision, recall, and F1-score all exceeding 95%. However, as the proportion of GAN images increased further, performance gradually declined. This study suggests that while GANs are useful for augmenting limited datasets especially when real data is scarce, too much synthetic data can introduce artifacts that affect the model's ability to generalize to real world cases.