Successful training of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) requires a substantial amount of data. With small datasets, networks generalize poorly. Data Augmentation techniques improve the generalizability of neural networks by using existing training data more effectively. Standard data augmentation methods, however, produce limited plausible alternative data. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have been utilized to generate new data and improve CNN performance. Nevertheless, generative models have not been used for augmenting data to improve the training of another generative model. In this work, we propose a new GAN architecture for semi-supervised augmentation of chest X-rays for the detection of pneumonia. We show that the proposed GAN can augment data for a specific class of images (pneumonia) using images from both classes (pneumonia and normal) in an image domain (chest X-rays). We demonstrate that using our proposed GAN-based data augmentation method significantly improves the performance of the state-of-the-art anomaly detection architecture, AnoGAN, in detecting pneumonia in chest X-rays, increasing AUC from 0.83 to 0.88.
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