Medical applications of generative adversarial network: a visualization analysis

Deep learning (DL) is one of the latest approaches to artificial intelligence. As an unsupervised DL method, a generative adversarial network (GAN) can be used to synthesize new data.

To explore GAN applications in medicine and point out the significance of its existence for clinical medical research, as well as to provide a visual bibliometric analysis of GAN applications in the medical field in combination with the scientometric software Citespace and statistical analysis methods.

PubMed, MEDLINE, Web of Science, and Google Scholar were searched to identify studies of GAN in medical applications between 2017 and 2022. This study was performed and reported according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. Citespace was used to analyze the number of publications, authors, institutions, and keywords of articles related to GAN in medical applications.

The applications of GAN in medicine are not limited to medical image processing, but will also penetrate wider and more complex fields, or may be applied to clinical medicine. Eligibility criteria were the full texts of peer-reviewed journals reporting the application of GANs in medicine. Research selections included material published in English between 1 January 2017 and 1 December 2022.

GAN has been fully applied to the medical field and will be more deeply and widely used in clinical medicine, especially in the field of privacy protection and medical diagnosis. However, clinical applications of GAN require consideration of ethical and legal issues. GAN-based applications should be well validated by expert radiologists.