Background

Positron emission tomography (PET) is one of the most effective imaging methods for detecting lung cancer, and artificial intelligence-based approaches are increasingly being applied to PET-based lung cancer detection. However, this typically requires a large amount of labeled data for training, while obtaining sufficient labeled PET imaging data remains challenging.

Objective

To improve the accuracy of three-dimensional (3D) lung cancer detection in PET images and address the issue of scarce labeled data, this study aims to propose a novel self-supervised learning method based on the pseudo image generation.

Methods

This method first uses a spatial tumor simulator to generate 3D images resembling real lung cancer lesions, and randomly implants them into the lung regions of PET images to construct pseudo-lung-cancer PET images. Subsequently, a restoration task based on pseudo-cancer images and normal images is designed as a self-supervised pretraining objective, using the 55 training cases to generate paired original and pseudo-lesion PET images, which are used to pretrain a Dual-Attention Hybrid Unet (DH-Unet) encoder–decoder integrated with a self-attention mechanism. Finally, the model is fine-tuned using real labeled PET data from these same 55 cases, along with 10 additional test cases, all pathologically confirmed as lung cancer, to complete the 3D lung cancer detection task.

Results

Experimental results show that this method achieves significant performance in the lung cancer detection task, with an mAP@ 0.10 to 0.50 of 0.4616, which is 13.72% higher than that of the random initialization method and 11.1% higher than that of traditional self-supervised models.

Conclusion

The proposed self-supervised learning framework, which combines pseudo image generation and a self-attention-equipped DH-Unet, provides an effective approach for improving lung cancer detection in PET imaging, especially in scenarios with limited labeled data.