3D Segmentation of Pulmonary Nodules Based on Multi-View and Semi-Supervised

Abstract

For large-scale CT images, the automatic segmentation of nodules is the foundation for diagnosis of various pulmonary diseases. Most existing methods have made great progress in pulmonary segmentation. But because of the similar structure between vessels and nodules in 2D, it lacks the ability to extract more discriminative features. The accuracy is still not satisfying. And the task remains challenging due to the lack of voxel labels and training strategies to balance foreground and background. To solve these problems, a 3D segmentation network of pulmonary nodules based on semi-supervised was proposed. Firstly, a framework of multi-view feature extraction was designed to solve the problem of high similarity between nodules and other tissues. It extracted features from three different views to improve precision. And three parallel dilated convolutions were added for multi-scale feature extraction. Hence, the spatial and semantic information of different sizes can be better obtained. Secondly, for the problem of identifying difficult samples, a hybrid loss function with an adjustment factor was proposed. It magnifies the loss of difficult samples, which will attract more attention from the network. And a new regularization term was introduced to avoid overfitting. The entire network was trained with a few labeled CT data set through an improved semi-supervised learning strategy, which was optimized with a new self-paced regularization. Experimental results show that the average sensitivity of the proposed method is 95.81%. It is superior to other methods in terms of precision and Dice index especially when the data set is not satisfied.

Keywords

• Pulmonary nodules segmentation
• multi-view
• semi-supervised
• dilated convolution