Generative Adversarial Networks for Augmenting Endoscopy Image Datasets of Stomach Precancerous Lesions: A Review

Gastric cancer (GC) is still a significant public health issue, among the most common and deadly cancers globally. The identification and characterization of precancerous lesions of the stomach using endoscopy are crucial for determining the risk of cancer and guiding appropriate surveillance. In this scenario, deep learning (DL)-based computer vision methods have the potential to help us classify and identify particular patterns in endoscopic images, leading to a more accurate classification of these types of lesions. The quantity and quality of the data used heavily influence the classification performance of DL networks. However, one of the major setbacks for developing high-performance DL classification models is the typical need for more available data in the medical field. This review explores the use of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and classical data augmentation techniques for improving the classification of precancerous stomach lesions. GANs are DL models that have shown promising results in generating synthetic data, which can be used to augment limited medical datasets. This review discusses recent studies that have implemented GANs and classical data augmentation methods to improve the accuracy of cancerous lesion classification. The results indicate that GANs can effectively increase the dataset’s size, enhance the classification models’ performance. In specific applications, such as the augmentation of endoscopic images depicting gastrointestinal polyps and Barrett’s esophagus Adenocarcinoma, our review reveals instances where GANs, including models like Deep Convolutional GANs and conditional GANs, outperform classical data augmentation methods. Furthermore, this review highlights the challenges and limitations of the recent works using GANs and classical data augmentation techniques in medical imaging analysis and proposes directions for future research.