ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Oncol.
Sec. Thoracic Oncology
This article is part of the Research TopicArtificial Intelligence Advancing Lung Cancer Screening and TreatmentView all 14 articles
Multi-Adapter SAM-Inspired Bronchoscopic Image Segmentation for Lung Cancer Diagnosis
Provisionally accepted- 1China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation 731 Hospital, Beijing, China
- 2Fourth Hospital of Hebei Medical University, Shijiazhuang, China
- 3Hebei Medical University, Shijiazhuang, China
- 4Hunan University of Technology and Business, Changsha, China
- 5The Fourth Affiliated Hospital of Hebei Medical University, Shijiazhuang, China
- 6Genertec Digital Technology Co. Ltd, Beijing, China
- 7Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China
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Introduction:Lung cancer remains the leading cause of cancer-related mortality. Although bronchoscopy allows direct visualization and tissue sampling, detecting subtle lesions is still challenging due to limited resolution, variable imaging conditions, and the complex structure of the airway. Most existing approaches treat lesion segmentation and cancer diagnosis as separate tasks, which can reduce diagnostic coherence and limit clinical applicability. Method: We propose a novel Multi-Adapter-based Segment Any Bronchoscope Model (MASA), an end-to-end framework with an encoder that fuses spatial, frequency, and positional information and a dual-decoder that performs simultaneous lesion segmentation and lung cancer diagnosis. MASA was trained/evaluated on the public BM-BronchoLC dataset. Results: On BM-BronchoLC, MASA improved lesion segmentation over the strongest baseline (ESFPNet), raising mDice by +3.01\% and mIoU by +1.24\%. For diagnosis, MASA increased Macro-F1 by +8.1 points and AUPRC by +14.1\%. Conclusion: MASA provides a unified and interpretable pipeline for automated bronchoscopic image analysis, generating pixel-level lesion maps alongside case-level diagnostic predictions. The framework shows strong promise for improving early lung cancer detection and enhancing the efficiency of bronchoscopic workflows in clinical practice.
Keywords: Adapter-based deep learning, Bronchoscopic imaging, lesion segmentation, lung cancer diagnosis, multitask learning
Received: 15 Sep 2025; Accepted: 07 Jan 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Li, Liu, Ye, Cui, Zhang, Meng, Guo and Min. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Jin Guo
Xianjun Min
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.
