MTGAN: Mask and Texture-driven Generative Adversarial Network for Lung Nodule Segmentation

Accurate segmentation for lung nodules in lung computed tomography (CT) scans plays a key role in the early diagnosis of lung cancer. Many existing methods, especially U-Net, have made significant progress in lung nodule segmentation. However, due to the complex shapes of lung nodules and the similarity of visual characteristics between nodules and lung tissues, an accurate segmentation with low false positives of lung nodules is still a challenging problem. Considering the fact that both boundary and texture information of lung nodules are important for obtaining an accurate segmentation result, we propose a novel Mask and Texture-driven Generative Adversarial Network (MTGAN) with a joint multi-scale $L_{1}$ loss for lung nodule segmentation, which takes full advantages of U-Net and adversarial training. The proposed MTGAN leverages adversarial learning strategy guided by the boundary and texture information of lung nodules to generate more accurate segmentation results with lesser false positives. We validate our model with the LIDC-IDRI dataset, and experimental results show that our method achieves excellent segmentation results for a variety of lung nodules, especially for juxtapleural nodules and low-dense nodules. Without any bells and whistles, the proposed MTGAN achieves significant segmentation performance with the Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) of 85.24% on the LIDC-IDRI dataset.