3 research outputs found
Towards automatic pulmonary nodule management in lung cancer screening with deep learning
The introduction of lung cancer screening programs will produce an
unprecedented amount of chest CT scans in the near future, which radiologists
will have to read in order to decide on a patient follow-up strategy. According
to the current guidelines, the workup of screen-detected nodules strongly
relies on nodule size and nodule type. In this paper, we present a deep
learning system based on multi-stream multi-scale convolutional networks, which
automatically classifies all nodule types relevant for nodule workup. The
system processes raw CT data containing a nodule without the need for any
additional information such as nodule segmentation or nodule size and learns a
representation of 3D data by analyzing an arbitrary number of 2D views of a
given nodule. The deep learning system was trained with data from the Italian
MILD screening trial and validated on an independent set of data from the
Danish DLCST screening trial. We analyze the advantage of processing nodules at
multiple scales with a multi-stream convolutional network architecture, and we
show that the proposed deep learning system achieves performance at classifying
nodule type that surpasses the one of classical machine learning approaches and
is within the inter-observer variability among four experienced human
observers.Comment: Published on Scientific Report
Increasing CAD system efficacy for lung texture analysis using a convolutional network
International audienceThe infiltrative lung diseases are a class of irreversible, non-neoplastic lung pathologies requiring regular follow-up with CT imaging. Quantifying the evolution of the patient status imposes the development of automated classification tools for lung texture. For the large majority of CAD systems, such classification relies on a two-dimensional analysis of axial CT images. In a previously developed CAD system, we proposed a fully-3D approach exploiting a multi-scale morphological analysis which showed good performance in detecting diseased areas, but with a major drawback consisting of sometimes overestimating the pathological areas and mixing different type of lung patterns. This paper proposes a combination of the existing CAD system with the classification outcome provided by a convolutional network, specifically tuned-up, in order to increase the specificity of the classification and the confidence to diagnosis. The advantage of using a deep learning approach is a better regularization of the classification output (because of a deeper insight into a given pathological class over a large series of samples) where the previous system is extra-sensitive due to the multi-scale response on patient-specific, localized patterns. In a preliminary evaluation, the combined approach was tested on a 10 patient database of various lung pathologies, showing a sharp increase of true detections