Unsupervised Anomaly Detection with Generative Adversarial Networks to Guide Marker Discovery
Thomas SchleglPhilipp SeeböckSebastian M. WaldsteinUrsula Schmidt-ErfurthGeorg Langs
Introduces AnoGAN, a deep generative adversarial framework that detects and localizes pathological markers in medical images without labeled disease data by mapping unseen scans against a learned distribution of healthy anatomy.
The article addresses the challenge of identifying disease markers in medical images such as retinal optical coherence tomography scans. Current methods rely on large annotated datasets of known markers, which restricts discovery of new indicators and demands high labeling effort. This limits the ability to exploit rich imaging data for diagnosis, progression monitoring, and treatment decisions.
The work set out to evaluate whether unsupervised learning with generative adversarial networks could model normal anatomical variability and flag anomalies as candidate markers without any labeled pathology examples.
Researchers trained a deep convolutional generative adversarial network on one million image patches extracted from 270 volumes of healthy retinas. They developed a mapping procedure from image space to the latent space that combines a residual loss and a discrimination loss based on intermediate discriminator features. They tested the resulting anomaly score on 8192 patches from 20 additional volumes, including both healthy cases and cases with retinal fluid.
The model generated realistic images of normal anatomy and produced an area under the ROC curve of 0.89 for image-level anomaly detection. It correctly identified regions of retinal fluid and also flagged hyperreflective foci never seen during training. The proposed discrimination loss improved performance over a reference approach, while the residual score alone already yielded strong results. An adversarial convolutional autoencoder performed noticeably worse.
These findings indicate that the method can surface both known and previously unannotated anomalies at scale, supporting data-driven marker discovery and reducing dependence on exhaustive manual annotation. The approach shows potential to accelerate identification of new imaging indicators for disease monitoring.
Further work should include clinical validation of newly discovered anomalies and testing on additional imaging modalities or disease types. A pilot study on larger unlabeled cohorts would help confirm generalizability before routine deployment.
The evaluation used only a modest number of test volumes and focused quantitative metrics on known fluid regions, so performance on entirely novel anomalies remains uncertain. Results are encouraging but should be interpreted with caution until larger-scale confirmation is available.
- Paper: Generative Adversarial Networks, Ian J. Goodfellow et al. (2014). It introduces the foundational generative adversarial network (GAN) framework, which forms the core architecture that the source adapts for unsupervised anomaly detection.
- Paper: Unsupervised Representation Learning with Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks, Alec Radford et al. (2016). It establishes the deep convolutional GAN (DCGAN) architecture used directly by the source to model healthy anatomical variability.
- Paper: Autoencoding beyond pixels using a learned similarity metric, Anders Boesen Lindbo Larsen et al. (2015). It develops the concept of using intermediate discriminator feature representations as perceptual similarity metrics, inspiring the discriminator-based loss used in the source's anomaly scoring.
- Paper: Adversarial Autoencoders, Alireza Makhzani et al. (2015). It introduces adversarial autoencoders, establishing the adversarial reconstruction baseline against which the source compares its latent-space mapping GAN approach.
- Paper: Deep One-Class Classification, Lukas Ruff et al. (2018). It advances deep anomaly detection by formulating an end-to-end objective (Deep SVDD) that optimizes directly for a normal-data boundary rather than relying on generative reconstruction errors.
- Paper: Deep Autoencoding Gaussian Mixture Model for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection, Bo Zong et al. (2018). It extends unsupervised anomaly detection by coupling latent dimensionality reduction with joint Gaussian mixture density estimation to capture complex regular distributions.
- Paper: Deep Anomaly Detection with Outlier Exposure, Dan Hendrycks et al. (2019). It improves out-of-distribution and anomaly detection by showing how exposing models to auxiliary generic outliers during training dramatically sharpens detection margins.
- Paper: A Simple Unified Framework for Detecting Out-of-Distribution Samples and Adversarial Attacks, Kimin Lee et al. (2018). It presents a unified framework utilizing distance metrics across hidden layer representations of pre-trained networks to detect abnormal and out-of-distribution inputs.
- Paper: Energy-based Out-of-distribution Detection, Weitang Liu et al. (2020). It introduces energy scores as an alternative anomaly scoring metric derived from discriminative classifiers to reliably differentiate unfamiliar test examples from normal data.
