Title
DeepLN: A framework for automatic lung nodule detection using multi-resolution CT screening images
Abstract
Computed tomography (CT) is an important and valuable tool for detecting and diagnosing lung cancer at an early stage. Commonly, CT screenings with lower dose and resolution are used for preliminary screening. In particular, many hospitals in smaller towns only provide CT screenings at low resolution. However,when patients are diagnosed with suspected cancer, they are transferred or recommended to larger hospitals for more sophisticated examinations with high-resolution CT scans. Therefore, multi-resolution CT images deserve attention and are critical in clinical practice. Currently, the available open source datasets only contain high-resolution CT screening images. To address this problem, a multi-resolution CT screening image dataset called the DeepLNDataset is constructed. A three-level labeling criterion and a semi-automatic annotation system are presented to guarantee the correctness and efficiency of lung nodule annotation. Moreover, a novel framework called DeepLN is proposed to detect lung nodules in both low-resolution and high-resolution CT screening images. The multi-level features are extracted by a neural-network based detector to locate the lung nodules. Hard negative mining and a modified focal loss function are employed to solve the common category imbalance problem. A novel non-maximum suppression based ensemble strategy is proposed to synthesize the results from multiple neural network models trained on CT image datasets of different resolutions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that considers the influence of multiple resolutions on lung nodule detection. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can address this issue well.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1016/j.knosys.2019.105128
Knowledge-Based Systems
Keywords
Field
DocType
Lung nodules detection,Multi-model ensemble,Multi-resolution CT screening images
Lung cancer,Data mining,Annotation,Lung,Computer science,Correctness,Clinical Practice,Artificial neural network,Cancer
Journal
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
189
0950-7051
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Xiuyuan Xu100.34
Chengdi Wang201.35
Jixiang Guo3135.29
Lan Yang400.34
Hongli Bai590.84
Weimin Li692.19
Zhang Yi735637.14