HybridGAN: hybrid generative adversarial networks for MR image synthesis

In this paper, we propose HybridGAN – a new medical MR image synthesis methods via generative adversarial learning. Specifically, our synthesizer generates MRI data in a sequential manner: first in order to improve the robustness of image synthesis, an input full-size real MR image is divided into an array of sub-images. Then, to avoid overfitting limited MRI encodings, these sub-images and an unlimited amount of random latent noise vectors become the input of automatic encoder for learning the marginal image distributions of real images. Finally, pseudo patches with constrained noise vectors are put into RU-NET which is a component of our HybridGAN to generate a large number of synthetic MR images. In RU-NET, A SpliceLayer is then employed to fuse sub-images together in an interlaced manner into a full-size image. The experimental results show that HybridGAN can effectively synthesize a large variety of MR images and display a good visual quality. Compared to the state-of-the-art synthesis methods, our method achieves a significant improvement in terms of both visual and quantitative evaluation metrics.