The retrospective multicenter cohort enrolled 40,571 patients (Table 1 lists 40,845) across 10 Chinese hospitals, with a rare-subtype imbalance (FTC 4,102; MTC 997; ATC 274 patients) that motivates the whole approach. Using ResNet50 classifiers, Tiger-F feature-guided augmentation produced the largest reported diagnostic gains: benign-vs-FTC test AUROC rose from 0.7364 (95% CI 0.69β0.75) to 0.8442 (95% CI 0.75β0.85), and benign-vs-MTC from 0.7523 (95% CI 0.67β0.79) to 0.8234 (95% CI 0.78β0.85); sensitivity for FTC improved from 0.5833 to 0.7983 and specificity from 0.6250 to 0.8404 .
External validation supports generalization: on out-of-distribution ATC data (372 images, 274 patients), Tiger-F improved test AUC by 12.6% over no augmentation; on breast subtypes, PCB AUC rose from 0.6889 to 0.8533; and on VinDr-PCXR four-class chest classification, accuracy improved 20.3% and Brier Score fell 44.7% .
Physicians judged Tiger-F images authentic in 92.2% of cases versus 98.0% for real images and 33.7% for other generative methods; per-subtype feature-identification accuracy for generated samples reached 84.1% (PTC), 81.5% (FTC), and 82.8% (MTC), close to real-image levels . Quantitative metrics showed Tiger-F outperforming Stable Diffusion with CMMD reductions of 26.79β38.46%, GS reductions of 18.65β82.02%, a 16.69% FID reduction, and a 39.17% IS increase .
Notable limitations are mostly self-reported: the study is retrospective and thyroid-focused, no prospective or multi-ethnic external validation exists, and the dose-response of generated-sample volume vs accuracy was not quantified . BGPT-inferred concerns beyond those reported: a patient-count discrepancy between the text (40,571) and Table 1 (40,845); CLIP-based and physician feature evaluations overlap methodologically since CLIP was fine-tuned on the same feature taxonomy; synthetic-data gains risk text-prompt leakage if prompt templates mirror test-set feature descriptors; and the ~92% Turing realism, while high, is statistically distinguishable from real images, meaning subtle artifacts remain. Code (Apache 2.0) and a minimum thyroid dataset are on GitHub and Hugging Face, aiding reproducibility, but full raw imaging and clinical records are restricted . Falsification would require independent prospective cohorts where Tiger-F augmentation fails to beat no-augmentation baselines on held-out rare-subtype test sets.
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