Title
Dual-branch residual network for lung nodule segmentation.
Abstract
An accurate segmentation of lung nodules in computed tomography (CT) images is critical to lung cancer analysis and diagnosis. However, due to the variety of lung nodules and the similarity of visual characteristics between nodules and their surroundings, a robust segmentation of nodules becomes a challenging problem. In this study, we propose the Dual-branch Residual Network (DB-ResNet) which is a data-driven model. Our approach integrates two new schemes to improve the generalization capability of the model: (1) the proposed model can simultaneously capture multi-view and multi-scale features of different nodules in CT images; (2) we combine the features of the intensity and the convolutional neural networks (CNN). We propose a pooling method, called the central intensity-pooling layer (CIP), to extract the intensity features of the center voxel of the block, and then use the CNN to obtain the convolutional features of the center voxel of the block. In addition, we designed a weighted sampling strategy based on the boundary of nodules for the selection of those voxels using the weighting score, to increase the accuracy of the model. The proposed method has been extensively evaluated on the LIDC-IDRI dataset containing 986 nodules. Experimental results show that the DB-ResNet achieves superior segmentation performance with the dice similarity coefficient (DSC) of 82.74% on the dataset. Moreover, we compared our results with those of four radiologists on the same dataset. The comparison showed that our DSC was 0.49% higher than that of human experts. This proves that our proposed method is as good as the experienced radiologist.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1016/j.asoc.2019.105934
Applied Soft Computing
Keywords
Field
DocType
Lung nodule segmentation,Residual neural networks,Deep learning,Computer-aided diagnosis
Voxel,Residual,Weighting,Pattern recognition,Convolution,Computer science,Segmentation,Pooling,Artificial intelligence,Dice,Artificial neural network
Journal
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
86
1568-4946
3
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.38
13
8
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Haichao Cao162.12
Hong Liu29618.53
Enmin Song317624.53
Chih-Cheng Hung441.78
Guangzhi Ma5245.32
Xiangyang Xu67610.40
Renchao Jin7308.83
Jianguo Lu830.38