Pith. sign in

REVIEW 7 cited by

Augmenting medical image classifiers with synthetic data from latent diffusion models

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 2308.12453 v1 pith:STJ6MXHI submitted 2023-08-23 cs.CV cs.AIcs.LG

classification cs.CVcs.AIcs.LG
keywords datasyntheticdiseaseimageimageslatentmodelskin
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
0 comments
read the original abstract

While hundreds of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms are now approved or cleared by the US Food and Drugs Administration (FDA), many studies have shown inconsistent generalization or latent bias, particularly for underrepresented populations. Some have proposed that generative AI could reduce the need for real data, but its utility in model development remains unclear. Skin disease serves as a useful case study in synthetic image generation due to the diversity of disease appearance, particularly across the protected attribute of skin tone. Here we show that latent diffusion models can scalably generate images of skin disease and that augmenting model training with these data improves performance in data-limited settings. These performance gains saturate at synthetic-to-real image ratios above 10:1 and are substantially smaller than the gains obtained from adding real images. As part of our analysis, we generate and analyze a new dataset of 458,920 synthetic images produced using several generation strategies. Our results suggest that synthetic data could serve as a force-multiplier for model development, but the collection of diverse real-world data remains the most important step to improve medical AI algorithms.

Discussion (0). Continue with ORCID to comment.

Forward citations

Cited by 7 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. OpenAlex reports about 12 citations worldwide. Full citation record

  1. Controllable Generation of Diverse Dermatological Imagery for Fair and Efficient Malignancy Classification

    cs.CV 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A hybrid generative framework expands scarce dermatology data over 400× and reports 90.9% malignancy classification accuracy with improved fairness on the DDI benchmark.

  2. A Foundational Generative Model for Breast Ultrasound Image Analysis

    cs.AI 2025-01 reject novelty 6.0 of 10

    A diffusion model pretrained on 3.5 million breast ultrasound images generates synthetic data that reportedly trains downstream classifiers to match real-data performance and beat radiologists in early breast cancer d...

  3. LesionGen: A Concept-Guided Diffusion Model for Dermatology Image Synthesis

    eess.IV 2025-07 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    Concept-guided captions and prompt balancing improve synthetic skin lesion images enough that augmenting real data with them lifts rare-class classification, though synthetic-only training remains clearly worse than r...

  4. Diverse Image Generation with Diffusion Models and Cross Class Label Learning for Polyp Classification

    eess.IV 2025-02 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    Text-prompt fine-tuned Stable Diffusion can generate diverse synthetic colonoscopy polyp images, and using them as augmentation improves polyp classification balanced accuracy by up to 7.91%.

  5. MRI Image Generation Based on Text Prompts

    eess.IV 2025-05 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    Fine-tuning Stable Diffusion with MRI-text pairs yields plausible brain MRI images by field strength and modality, and synthetic images appear to improve a small MRI contrast classification task.

  6. Ultrasound Image Generation using Latent Diffusion Models

    cs.CV 2025-02 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    Fine-tuning Stable Diffusion on breast ultrasound images can generate realistic synthetic ultrasound images, and conditioning with segmentation masks via ControlNet gives user control over lesion shape.

  7. Enhancing Early Diabetic Retinopathy Detection through Synthetic DR1 Image Generation: A StyleGAN3 Approach

    eess.IV 2025-01 reject novelty 4.0 of 10

    A StyleGAN3 model generates realistic synthetic DR1 fundus images with good FID/KID scores, but the paper does not test whether these images improve any diabetic retinopathy classifier.

Pith tools