A universal lesion detection method based on partially supervised learning

Partially supervised learning (PSL) is urgently necessary to explore to construct an efficient universal lesion detection (ULD) segmentation model. An annotated dataset is crucial but hard to acquire because of too many Computed tomography (CT) images and the lack of professionals in computer-aided detection/diagnosis (CADe/CADx). To address this problem, we propose a novel loss function to reduce the proportion of negative anchors which is extremely likely to classify the lesion area (positive samples) as a negative bounding box, further leading to an unexpected performance. Before calculating loss, we generate a mask to intentionally choose fewer negative anchors which will backward wrongful loss to the network. During the process of loss calculation, we set a parameter to reduce the proportion of negative samples, and it significantly reduces the adverse effect of misclassification on the model. Our experiments are implemented in a 3D framework by feeding a partially annotated dataset named DeepLesion, a large-scale public dataset for universal lesion detection from CT. We implement a lot of experiments to choose the most suitable parameter, and the result shows that the proposed method has greatly improved the performance of a ULD detector. Our code can be obtained at https://github.com/PLuld0/PLuldl.