Generative adversarial networks for anonymized healthcare of lung cancer patients

Abstract

The digital twin in health care is the dynamic digital representation of the patient’s anatomy and physiology through computational models which are continuously updated from clinical data. Furthermore, used in combination with machine learning technologies, it should help doctors in therapeutic path and in minimally invasive intervention procedures. Confidentiality of medical records is a very delicate issue, therefore some anonymization process is mandatory in order to maintain patients privacy. Moreover, data availability is very limited in some health domains like lung cancer treatment. Hence, generation of synthetic data conformed to real data would solve this issue. In this paper, the use of generative adversarial networks (GAN) for the generation of synthetic data of lung cancer patients is introduced as a tool to solve this problem in the form of anonymized synthetic patients. Generated synthetic patients are validated using both statistical methods, as well as by oncologists using the indirect mortality rate obtained for patients in different stages.