Automatic Pulmonary Nodule Detection in CT Scans Using Convolutional Neural Networks Based on Maximum Intensity Projection

Accurate pulmonary nodule detection is a crucial step in lung cancer screening. Computer-aided detection (CAD) systems are not routinely used by radiologists for pulmonary nodule detection in clinical practice despite their potential benefits. Maximum intensity projection (MIP) images improve the detection of pulmonary nodules in radiological evaluation with computed tomography (CT) scans. Inspired by the clinical methodology of radiologists, we aim to explore the feasibility of applying MIP images to improve the effectiveness of automatic lung nodule detection using convolutional neural networks (CNNs). We propose a CNN-based approach that takes MIP images of different slab thicknesses (5 mm, 10 mm, 15 mm) and 1 mm axial section slices as input. Such an approach augments the two-dimensional (2-D) CT slice images with more representative spatial information that helps discriminate nodules from vessels through their morphologies. Our proposed method achieves sensitivity of 92.67% with 1 false positive per scan and sensitivity of 94.19% with 2 false positives per scan for lung nodule detection on 888 scans in the LIDC-IDRI dataset. The use of thick MIP images helps the detection of small pulmonary nodules (3 mm-10 mm) and results in fewer false positives. Experimental results show that utilizing MIP images can increase the sensitivity and lower the number of false positives, which demonstrates the effectiveness and significance of the proposed MIP-based CNNs framework for automatic pulmonary nodule detection in CT scans. The proposed method also shows the potential that CNNs could gain benefits for nodule detection by combining the clinical procedure.Comment: Submitted to IEEE TM

Multi-scale analysis of lung computed tomography images

A computer-aided detection (CAD) system for the identification of lung internal nodules in low-dose multi-detector helical Computed Tomography (CT) images was developed in the framework of the MAGIC-5 project. The three modules of our lung CAD system, a segmentation algorithm for lung internal region identification, a multi-scale dot-enhancement filter for nodule candidate selection and a multi-scale neural technique for false positive finding reduction, are described. The results obtained on a dataset of low-dose and thin-slice CT scans are shown in terms of free response receiver operating characteristic (FROC) curves and discussed.Comment: 18 pages, 12 low-resolution figure

An Interpretable Deep Hierarchical Semantic Convolutional Neural Network for Lung Nodule Malignancy Classification

While deep learning methods are increasingly being applied to tasks such as computer-aided diagnosis, these models are difficult to interpret, do not incorporate prior domain knowledge, and are often considered as a "black-box." The lack of model interpretability hinders them from being fully understood by target users such as radiologists. In this paper, we present a novel interpretable deep hierarchical semantic convolutional neural network (HSCNN) to predict whether a given pulmonary nodule observed on a computed tomography (CT) scan is malignant. Our network provides two levels of output: 1) low-level radiologist semantic features, and 2) a high-level malignancy prediction score. The low-level semantic outputs quantify the diagnostic features used by radiologists and serve to explain how the model interprets the images in an expert-driven manner. The information from these low-level tasks, along with the representations learned by the convolutional layers, are then combined and used to infer the high-level task of predicting nodule malignancy. This unified architecture is trained by optimizing a global loss function including both low- and high-level tasks, thereby learning all the parameters within a joint framework. Our experimental results using the Lung Image Database Consortium (LIDC) show that the proposed method not only produces interpretable lung cancer predictions but also achieves significantly better results compared to common 3D CNN approaches

A Survey on Deep Learning in Medical Image Analysis

Deep learning algorithms, in particular convolutional networks, have rapidly become a methodology of choice for analyzing medical images. This paper reviews the major deep learning concepts pertinent to medical image analysis and summarizes over 300 contributions to the field, most of which appeared in the last year. We survey the use of deep learning for image classification, object detection, segmentation, registration, and other tasks and provide concise overviews of studies per application area. Open challenges and directions for future research are discussed.Comment: Revised survey includes expanded discussion section and reworked introductory section on common deep architectures. Added missed papers from before Feb 1st 201