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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
Qian  LiQian Li1Xinbo  LiuXinbo Liu2Chao  YeChao Ye3Sen  CuiSen Cui4Jinze  ZhangJinze Zhang5Xuanyu  MengXuanyu Meng6Jin  GuoJin Guo7*Xianjun  MinXianjun Min1*
  • 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

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

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

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