# Assessment of Using Synthetic Data in Brain Tumor Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11922 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11922/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 21 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Aug 2025.

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

- [Comprehensive Exploration of Synthetic Data Generation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02524/) (2024)
- [Automatic Brain Tumor Detection and Segmentation Using U-Net Based Fully Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03820/) (2017)
- [How to build the best medical image segmentation algorithm using foundation models: a comprehensive empirical study with Segment Anything Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09957/) (2024)
- [Brain tumor segmentation using synthetic MR images -- A comparison of GANs and diffusion models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02986/) (2023)
- [1M parameters are enough? A lightweight CNN-based model for medical image segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16103/) (2023)
- [Regularization, early-stopping and dreaming: a Hopfield-like setup to address generalization and overfitting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01421/) (2023)
- [On Enhancing Brain Tumor Segmentation Across Diverse Populations with Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.02852/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Manual brain tumor segmentation from MRI scans is challenging due to tumor heterogeneity, scarcity of annotated data, and class imbalance in medical imaging datasets. Synthetic data generated by generative models has the potential to mitigate these issues by improving dataset diversity. This study investigates, as a proof of concept, the impact of incorporating synthetic MRI data, generated using a pre-trained GAN model, into training a U-Net segmentation network. Experiments were conducted using real data from the BraTS 2020 dataset, synthetic data generated with the medigan library, and hybrid datasets combining real and synthetic samples in varying proportions. While overall quantitative performance (Dice coefficient, IoU, precision, recall, accuracy) was comparable between real-only and hybrid-trained models, qualitative inspection suggested that hybrid datasets, particularly with 40% real and 60% synthetic data, improved whole tumor boundary delineation. However, region-wise accuracy for the tumor core and the enhancing tumor remained lower, indicating a persistent class imbalance. The findings support the feasibility of synthetic data as an augmentation strategy for brain tumor segmentation, while highlighting the need for larger-scale experiments, volumetric data consistency, and mitigating class imbalance in future work.