Softgan: Towards Accurate Lung Nodule Segmentation via Soft Mask Supervision

Accurate lung nodule segmentation from Computed Tomog-raphy (CT) images is crucial to the analysis and diagnosis of lung diseases such as COVID-19 and lung cancer. How-ever, due to the variety of lung nodules and the lack of high-quality labeling, accurate lung nodule segmentation is still a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a novel paradigm including an automatic accurate annotation pipeline and a segmentation network for this task. First, we introduce a new segmentation mask representation named Soft Mask which has richer and more accurate edge details description and better visualization, and we design a universal automatic Soft Mask annotation pipeline to deal with different datasets. Besides, we provide a new challenging lung nodules segmen-tation dataset with traditional binarized masks and our soft masks for further studies. Second, we propose an effective network called SoftGAN that includes an improved back-bone and an adversarial training framework with Soft Mask, in order to improve the performance of accurate lung nodules segmentation. Extensive experiments validate that our Soft-GAN outperforms the state-of-the-art methods for accurate lung nodule segmentation. [Datasetrelease]