  In Canada, prostate cancer is the most common form of cancer in men and
accounted for 20% of new cancer cases for this demographic in 2022. Due to
recent successes in leveraging machine learning for clinical decision support,
there has been significant interest in the development of deep neural networks
for prostate cancer diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment planning using
diffusion weighted imaging (DWI) data. A major challenge hindering widespread
adoption in clinical use is poor generalization of such networks due to
scarcity of large-scale, diverse, balanced prostate imaging datasets for
training such networks. In this study, we explore the efficacy of latent
diffusion for generating realistic prostate DWI data through the introduction
of an anatomic-conditional controlled latent diffusion strategy. To the best of
the authors' knowledge, this is the first study to leverage conditioning for
synthesis of prostate cancer imaging. Experimental results show that the
proposed strategy, which we call Cancer-Net PCa-Gen, enhances synthesis of
diverse prostate images through controllable tumour locations and better
anatomical and textural fidelity. These crucial features make it well-suited
for augmenting real patient data, enabling neural networks to be trained on a
more diverse and comprehensive data distribution. The Cancer-Net PCa-Gen
framework and sample images have been made publicly available at
https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/deetsadi/cancer-net-pca-gen-dataset as a part
of a global open-source initiative dedicated to accelerating advancement in
machine learning to aid clinicians in the fight against cancer.
