Unsupervised Multi-Discriminator Generative Adversarial Network for Lung Nodule Malignancy Classification

Abstract

Computer-aided diagnosis systems with deep learning frameworks have been used to identify benign and malignant pulmonary nodules in lung cancer diagnosis. It's commonly known that a premise of training complex deep neural nets is the large-scale labeled datasets. However, the abundance of labeled datasets is usually unavailable in many medical image domains. This factor can lead to the poor generalization performance of deep learning models. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-discriminator generative adversarial network model combined with an encoder for the classification of benign and malignant pulmonary nodules. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to apply unsupervised learning to identify benign and malignant lung nodules. Firstly, we use a multi-discriminator generative adversarial network to build a generative model trained with unlabeled benign lung nodule images. Then an encoder is combined with the trained generative model to establish a mapping of benign pulmonary nodule images to the latent space. The benign and malignant lung nodules are scored by calculating the GAN discriminator feature loss and image reconstruction loss. The model yields high anomaly scores on malignant images and low anomaly scores on benign images. Experimental results show that our method with only a small number of unlabeled datasets could achieve more competitive results compared with other supervised deep learning approaches.