Conditional Generative Adversarial Refinement Networks for Unbalanced Medical Image Semantic Segmentation

We propose a new generative adversarial architecture to mitigate imbalance data problem in medical image semantic segmentation where the majority of pixels belongs to a healthy region and few belong to lesion or non-health region. A model trained with imbalanced data tends to bias towards healthy data which is not desired in clinical applications and predicted outputs by these networks have high precision and low sensitivity. We propose a new conditional generative refinement network with three components: a generative, a discriminative, and a refinement networks to mitigate imbalanced data problem through ensemble learning. The generative network learns to the segment at the pixel level by getting feedback from the discriminative network according to the true positive and true negative maps. On the other hand, the refinement network learns to predict the false positive and the false negative masks produced by the generative network that has significant value, especially in medical application. The final semantic segmentation masks are then composed by the output of the three networks. The proposed architecture shows state-of-the-art results on LiTS-2017 for simultaneous liver and lesion segmentation, and MDA231 for microscopic cell segmentation. We have achieved competitive results on BraTS-2017 for brain tumor segmentation.