L-former : a lightweight transformer for realistic medical image generation and its application to super-resolution
Tong Zheng, Hirohisa Oda, Yuichiro Hayashi, Shota Nakamura, Masaki Mori, Hirotsugu Takabatake, Hiroshi Natori, Masahiro Oda, Kensaku Mori · 2023
Medical image analysis approaches such as data augmentation and domain adaption need huge amounts of realistic medical images. Generating realistic medical images by machine learning is a feasible approach. We propose L-former, a lightweight Transformer for realistic medical image generation. L-former can generate more reliable and realistic medical images than recent generative adversarial networks (GANs). Meanwhile, L-former does not consume as high computational cost as conventional Transformer-based generative models. L-former uses Transformers to generate low-resolution feature vectors at shallow layers, and uses convolutional neural networks to generate high-resolution realistic medical images at deep layers. Experimental results showed that L-former outperformed conventional GANs by FID scores 33.79 and 76.85 on two datasets, respectively. We further conducted a downstream study by using the images generated by L-former to perform a super-resolution task. A high PSNR score of 27.87 proved L-former’s ability to generate reliable images for super-resolution and showed its potential for applications in medical diagnosis.