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Semi-supervised lung nodule detection with adversarial learning

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Abstract

Lung cancer has long posed a severe threat to human life and health, and early detection as well as effective treatment can significantly improve the survival rates of patients. In recent years, deep learning has greatly propelled the advancement in image processing, yet its application in pulmonary nodule detection through deep learning is still at an early stage. Therefore, researching automatic pulmonary nodule detection technology based on deep learning, enhancing the performance of lung nodule detection, holds significant importance for improving the survival rates among lung cancer patients. This paper aims to address the above issues and propose a semi-supervised pulmonary nodule detection algorithm based on adversarial learning. A multi-task classification network is designed to distinguish between annotated and unannotated candidate pulmonary nodules while removing false-positive pulmonary nodules. The adversarial loss and maximum-minimum strategy are introduced into the training process, and the unannotated images and adversarial loss are used to update the 3D sliding window semantic segmentation network. To enable the adversarial loss to backpropagate, the algorithm makes some improvements to RoI pooling, connecting the 3D sliding window semantic segmentation network and multi-task classification network for end-to-end learning. In experiments, compared to the supervised lung nodule algorithm using only 50% labeled images, the semi-supervised lung nodule detection algorithm using 50% labeled images and 50% unlabeled images increased the average FROC from 0.677 to 0.717.

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The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61872284); Key Research and Development Program of Shaanxi(2023-YBGY-203,2023-YBGY-021); Industrialization Project of Shaanxi Provincial Department of Education (21JC017); "Thirteenth Five-Year" National Key R&D Program Project (Project Number: 2019YFD1100901); Natural Science Foundation of Shannxi Province, China(2021JLM-16); Key R&D Plan of Xianyang City (L2023-ZDYF-QYCX-021).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information and Control Engineering, Xi’an University of Architecture and Technology, Xi’an, 710054, China

    Qinlu He, Pengze Gao, Fan Zhang & Genqing Bian

  2. The First Affiliated Hospital of Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, 710043, China

    Chen Chen

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  1. Qinlu He
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  2. Pengze Gao
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He, Q., Gao, P., Zhang, F. et al. Semi-supervised lung nodule detection with adversarial learning. Multimed Tools Appl (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-024-19074-2

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