From Augmentation to Synthetic Evidence: Evaluating Generated Chest Radiographs at Dataset Intake
Shaikh Akib Shahriyar, Zinedine Sehili, Adam Arthur, Christopher Schwartz
While generated chest radiographs can serve as valuable data augmentation when explicitly declared, the same pixels become unsupported evidence when submitted as records of real clinical examinations. We study this dataset-intake vulnerability by disentangling three questions: (1) whether an image passes an automated technical quality check, (2) whether an origin classifier flags it as synthetic, and (3) whether a trusted provenance record supports the claimed clinical acquisition. In this study, a submitter uses Qwen3.8-27B to select up to 20 candidate radiographs from pools of 1,000 Cheff-identified or SynthCheX images, while a receiver evaluates image quality via MedGemma 1.5 and predicts origin using a linear probe over frozen DINOv3 features. Although quality selection increases MedGemma quality passes from 12/20 to 19/20 for Cheff-identified images and from 8/20 to 17/20 for SynthCheX, we find no evidence that candidate selection increases passage through both checks simultaneously: zero selected Cheff-identified images pass both gates, and uniform, quality-guided, and surrogate-guided selection yield 2, 1, and 2 SynthCheX passes out of 20, respectively. On unprocessed test cohorts, the origin classifier rejects 4,677 of 5,000 SynthCheX images at a nominal 5% false-alarm rate (flagging 110 of 2,297 real NIH radiographs), yet leaves 152 SynthCheX images that pass both pixel-level checks. Moreover, pixel-level screening is fragile to routine distribution shifts: JPEG compression reduces SynthCheX-versus-NIH AUROC from 0.987 to 0.841, and applying the NIH-calibrated threshold to an external genuine cohort (Open-I) triggers false alarms on 568 of 957 authentic radiographs (59.4%). Because pixel-level checks can filter submissions but cannot verify clinical acquisition claims, we argue that dataset intake pipelines must record and verify source provenance independently of image pixels.
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