Learning to detect chest radiographs containing lung nodules using visual attention networks

Machine learning approaches hold great potential for the automated detection of lung nodules in chest radiographs, but training the algorithms requires vary large amounts of manually annotated images, which are difficult to obtain. Weak labels indicating whether a radiograph is likely to contain pulmonary nodules are typically easier to obtain at scale by parsing historical free-text radiological reports associated to the radiographs. Using a repositotory of over 700,000 chest radiographs, in this study we demonstrate that promising nodule detection performance can be achieved using weak labels through convolutional neural networks for radiograph classification. We propose two network architectures for the classification of images likely to contain pulmonary nodules using both weak labels and manually-delineated bounding boxes, when these are available. Annotated nodules are used at training time to deliver a visual attention mechanism informing the model about its localisation performance. The first architecture extracts saliency maps from high-level convolutional layers and compares the estimated position of a nodule against the ground truth, when this is available. A corresponding localisation error is then back-propagated along with the softmax classification error. The second approach consists of a recurrent attention model that learns to observe a short sequence of smaller image portions through reinforcement learning. When a nodule annotation is available at training time, the reward function is modified accordingly so that exploring portions of the radiographs away from a nodule incurs a larger penalty. Our empirical results demonstrate the potential advantages of these architectures in comparison to competing methodologies

Dimensionality Reduction in Deep Learning for Chest X-Ray Analysis of Lung Cancer

Efficiency of some dimensionality reduction techniques, like lung segmentation, bone shadow exclusion, and t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE) for exclusion of outliers, is estimated for analysis of chest X-ray (CXR) 2D images by deep learning approach to help radiologists identify marks of lung cancer in CXR. Training and validation of the simple convolutional neural network (CNN) was performed on the open JSRT dataset (dataset #01), the JSRT after bone shadow exclusion - BSE-JSRT (dataset #02), JSRT after lung segmentation (dataset #03), BSE-JSRT after lung segmentation (dataset #04), and segmented BSE-JSRT after exclusion of outliers by t-SNE method (dataset #05). The results demonstrate that the pre-processed dataset obtained after lung segmentation, bone shadow exclusion, and filtering out the outliers by t-SNE (dataset #05) demonstrates the highest training rate and best accuracy in comparison to the other pre-processed datasets.Comment: 6 pages, 14 figure