Uncertainty-Aware Lung Nodule Segmentation with Multiple Annotations

Since radiologists have different training and clinical experience, they may provide various segmentation maps for a lung nodule. As a result, for a specific lung nodule, some regions have a higher chance of causing segmentation uncertainty, which brings difficulty for lung nodule segmentation with multiple annotations. To address this problem, this paper proposes an Uncertainty-Aware Segmentation Network (UAS-Net) based on multi-branch U-Net, which can learn the valuable visual features from the regions that may cause segmentation uncertainty and contribute to a better segmentation result. Meanwhile, this network can provide a Multi-Confidence Mask (MCM) simultaneously, pointing out regions with different segmentation uncertainty levels. We introduce a Feature-Aware Concatenation structure for different learning targets and let each branch have a specific learning preference. Moreover, a joint adversarial learning process is also adopted to help learn discriminative features of complex structures. Experimental results show that our method can predict the reasonable regions with higher uncertainty and improve lung nodule segmentation performance in LIDC-IDRI.