Synthetic Generation of Cardiac MR Images Combining Convolutional Variational Autoencoders and Style Transfer.

The number of studies in the medical field that uses machine learning and deep learning techniques has been increasing in the last years. However, these techniques require a huge amount of data that can be difficult and expensive to obtain. This specially happens with cardiac magnetic resonance (MR) images. One solution to the problem is raise the dataset size by generating synthetic data. Convolutional Variational Autoencoder (CVAe) is a deep learning technique which allows to generate synthetic images, but sometimes the synthetic images can be slightly blurred. We propose the combination of the CVAe technique combined with Style Transfer technique to generate synthetic realistic cardiac MR images. Clinical Relevance-The current work presents a tool to increase in a simple easy and fast way the cardiac magnetic resonance images dataset with which perform machine learning and deep learning studies.