From Canvas to Screen: Resurrecting Artists of the Past
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Integrating generative artificial intelligence (AI) art algorithms into medical imaging and radiology offers potential benefits for education, clinical practice, and research, such as creating pathology-specific images, enhancing quality, accelerating image acquisition, and reducing artifacts (2–5). However, this also raises cybersecurity concerns, including ransomware and fabricated pathologies. Prospective applications include cinematic rendering, multiplanar reconstruction, and three-dimensional segmentation. Additionally, AI-generated images can address the scarcity of high-quality, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act–compliant, annotated medical image data for research and model pretraining. Several text-to-image generative AI tools exist, including Midjourney (6), DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion, and starryai. The images presented in Figures 1 and 2 were created in Midjourney through Discord using simple “/imagine” prompts of “An oil painting of the human [brain/heart] in the style of [artist name].” Please see Appendix S1 for instructions on how these images were generated. Of note, images generated by AI text-to-image tools are not protected by U.S. copyright law because they “are not the product of human authorship,” according to the nation's Copyright Office (7).
Figure 1: The Heart as Envisioned by Artistic Legends. Images generated by Midjourney, version 5, show six representations of the human heart created in the distinctive styles of Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, Leonardo da Vinci, Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, and Rembrandt (top left to bottom right). The diverse interpretations highlight the potential of generative artificial intelligence art in exploring the complexity of the heart, while staying true to the original artistic visions of these legendary painters.
Figure 2: The Brain through the Eyes of the Masters. Images generated by Midjourney, version 5, show six representations of the human brain created in the distinctive styles of Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, Leonardo da Vinci, Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, and Rembrandt (top left to bottom right). Each rendition offers a unique perspective on the intricacies of the brain and demonstrates the transformative power of generative artificial intelligence in capturing the essence of each artist's style.
Acknowledgment
We acknowledge parts of this article were generated with GPT-4 (powered by OpenAI's language model; http://openai.com) and Midjourney (https://www.midjourney.com/app/).
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Article History
Received: May 1 2023Revision requested: May 12 2023
Revision received: May 13 2023
Accepted: May 16 2023
Published online: July 05 2023
