AIAT: Adaptive Iteration Adversarial Training for Robust Pulmonary Nodule Detection

Lung cancer is one of the leading causes of death worldwide. Early diagnosis through cancer screening can significantly improve lung cancer patients’ survival. Recently, deep learning based diagnostic systems for nodule detection have shown great potential in assisting radiologists to screen cancer more efficiently. However, studies have found that deep learning models lack robustness against imperceptible crafted adversarial attacks and few studied improving the robustness of pulmonary nodule detection. Therefore, making pulmonary nodule detection models robust remains challenges. Moreover, traditional adversarial training methods either hurt the natural generalization or need expensive computational cost. To address these challenges, here we propose a novel adversarial training method called, Adaptive Iteration Adversarial Training (AIAT). AIAT generates adversarial samples by adding adversarial noise with an adaptive iteration strategy, so that it can stably and fast train models with improving robustness. Extensive experiments on the LUNA 16 dataset show that AIAT improves robustness for pulmonary nodule detection without compromising the natural generalization, and largely reduces training time.