Simulating abnormalities in medical images with generative adversarial networks

Systems and methods for providing a novel framework to simulate the appearance of pathology on patients who otherwise lack that pathology. The systems and methods include a “simulator” that is a generative adversarial network (GAN). Rather than generating images from scratch, the systems and methods discussed herein simulate the addition of diseases-like appearance on existing scans of healthy patients. Focusing on simulating added abnormalities, as opposed to simulating an entire image, significantly reduces the difficulty of training GANs and produces results that more closely resemble actual, unmodified images. In at least some implementations, multiple GANs are used to simulate pathological tissues on scans of healthy patients to artificially increase the amount of available scans with abnormalities to address the issue of data imbalance with rare pathologies.