Enhanced Lung Cancer Segmentation with Deep Supervision and Hybrid Lesion Focal Loss in Chest CT Images

Lung cancer segmentation in chest CT images is challenging due to the varying sizes of tumors and the presence of surrounding structures with similar intensity values. To address these issues, we propose a lung cancer segmentation network that incorporates deep supervision and utilizes UNet3+ as the backbone. Additionally, we propose a hybrid lesion focal loss function comprising three components: pixel-based, region-based, and shape-based, which allows us to focus on the smaller tumor regions relative to the background and consider shape information for handling ambiguous boundaries. We validate our proposed method through comparative experiments with UNet and UNet3+ and demonstrate that our proposed method achieves superior performance in terms of Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) for tumors of all sizes.