PLUS: Plug-and-Play Enhanced Liver Lesion Diagnosis Model on Non-Contrast CT Scans
Journal:
arXiv
Published Date:
Jul 5, 2025
Abstract
Focal liver lesions (FLL) are common clinical findings during physical
examination. Early diagnosis and intervention of liver malignancies are crucial
to improving patient survival. Although the current 3D segmentation paradigm
can accurately detect lesions, it faces limitations in distinguishing between
malignant and benign liver lesions, primarily due to its inability to
differentiate subtle variations between different lesions. Furthermore,
existing methods predominantly rely on specialized imaging modalities such as
multi-phase contrast-enhanced CT and magnetic resonance imaging, whereas
non-contrast CT (NCCT) is more prevalent in routine abdominal imaging. To
address these limitations, we propose PLUS, a plug-and-play framework that
enhances FLL analysis on NCCT images for arbitrary 3D segmentation models. In
extensive experiments involving 8,651 patients, PLUS demonstrated a significant
improvement with existing methods, improving the lesion-level F1 score by
5.66%, the malignant patient-level F1 score by 6.26%, and the benign
patient-level F1 score by 4.03%. Our results demonstrate the potential of PLUS
to improve malignant FLL screening using widely available NCCT imaging
substantially.
