SynthCraft: An AI partner for synthetic data generation to support data access and augmentation in healthcare is drawing significant interest across the industry.
Author summary Medical research depends on access to patient data, but legitimate privacy concerns often mean access is restricted. We created SynthCraft to address this challenge. SynthCraft is an AI partner designed to help researchers generate synthetic versions of medical datasets entirely through natural language, without requiring programming skills. Synthetic data mimic the patterns seen in real datasets, but without containing actual patient data. However, creating and evaluating synthetic data is technically complex, requiring specialised knowledge that limits its accessibility. SynthCraft supports users through each step in the generation of synthetic data: analysing the original data, selecting appropriate generation methods, creating synthetic data itself, before finally rigorously evaluating the results. All actions and code used by SynthCraft are recorded throughout. We demonstrated SynthCraft’s capabilities using a national health survey and cancer genomics dataset. Models trained on our synthetic data performed comparably to those trained on real data. We also explored using synthetic data to address imbalances in ethnic representation, though we did not find that this improved model performance in these analyses. By making advanced methods accessible through natural language and ensuring transparent, reproducible workflows, such tools could transform how researchers apply state-of-the-art methods across biomedical research.
Experts suggest this could influence future trends and innovation in the sector.
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