Synthetic medical images using F & BGANfor improved lung nodules classification bymulti-scale VGG16

Lung cancer is one of the highest causes of cancer-related death in both men and women. Therefore, various diagnostic methods for lung nodules classification have been proposed to implement the early detection. Due to the limited amount and diversity of samples, these methods encounter some bottlenecks. In this paper, we intend to develop a method to enlarge the dataset and enhance the performance of pulmonary nodules classification. We propose a data augmentation method based on generative adversarial network (GAN), called Forward and Backward GAN (F & BGAN), which can generate high-quality synthetic medical images. F & BGAN has two stages, Forward GAN (FGAN) generates diverse images, and Backward GAN (BGAN) is used to improve the quality of images. Besides, a hierarchical learning framework, multi-scale VGG16 (M-VGG16) network, is proposed to extract discriminative features from alternating stacked layers. The methodology was evaluated on the Lung Image Database Consortium and Image Database Resource Initiative (LIDC-IDRI) dataset, with the best accuracy of 95.24%, sensitivity of 98.67%, specificity of 92.47% and area under ROC curve (AUROC) of 0.980. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of F & BGAN in generating medical images and the effectiveness of M-VGG16 in classifying malignant and benign nodules.