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.
Early detection of lung nodules with computed tomography (CT) is critical for the longer survival of lung cancer patients and better quality of life. Computer-aided detection/diagnosis (CAD) is proven valuable as a second or concurrent reader in this context. However, accurate detection of lung nodules remains a challenge for such CAD systems and even radiologists due to not only the variability in size, location, and appearance of lung nodules but also the complexity of lung structures. This leads to a high false-positive rate with CAD, compromising its clinical efficacy. Motivated by recent …
A Deep Learning Framework for Thyroid Nodule Segmentation and Malignancy Classification from Ultrasound Images
Tissue Image Analytics Centre, Department of Computer Science, University of Warwick, UK（沃里克大学计算机科学系组织图像分析中心，英国）；Royal Stoke University Hospital, University Hospitals of North Midlands, UK（北中部大学医院皇家斯托医院，英国）
Refer to the literature of lung nodule classification, many studies adopt Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) to directly predict the malignancy of lung nodules with original thoracic Computed Tomography (CT) and nodule location. However, these studies cannot tell how the CNN works in terms of predicting the malignancy of the given nodule, e.g., it's hard to conclude that whether the region within the nodule or the contextual information matters according to the output of the CNN. In this paper, we propose an interpretable and multi-task learning CNN -- Joint learning for \textbf{P}ulmonary \t…
National Institutes of Health（美国国立卫生研究院）；University of Central Florida（中佛罗里达大学）
Computed tomography imaging is a standard modality for detecting and assessing lung cancer. In order to evaluate the malignancy of lung nodules, clinical practice often involves expert qualitative ratings on several criteria describing a nodule's appearance and shape. Translating these features for computer-aided diagnostics is challenging due to their subjective nature and the difficulties in gaining a complete description. In this paper, we propose a computerized approach to quantitatively evaluate both appearance distinctions and 3D surface variations. Nodule shape was modeled and parameter…
Arkansas State University（阿肯色州立大学）；University of Minnesota（明尼苏达大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Shanghai University of Finance and Economics（上海财经大学）；Washington University（华盛顿大学）；University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences（阿肯色大学医学科学校区）
Computed tomography (CT) examinations are commonly used to predict lung nodule malignancy in patients, which are shown to improve noninvasive early diagnosis of lung cancer. It remains challenging for computational approaches to achieve performance comparable to experienced radiologists. Here we present NoduleX, a systematic approach to predict lung nodule malignancy from CT data, based on deep learning convolutional neural networks (CNN). For training and validation, we analyze >1000 lung nodules in images from the LIDC/IDRI cohort. All nodules were identified and classified by four experienc…
Eurecat, Centre Tecnòlogic de Catalunya（加泰罗尼亚技术中心Eurecat）；Universitat Pompeu Fabra（庞培法布拉大学）；Vall d’Hebron University Hospital（瓦尔德希伯伦大学医院）；ICREA（加泰罗尼亚研究与高级研究院）
Nodule malignancy assessment is a complex, time-consuming and error-prone task. Current clinical practice requires measuring changes in size and density of the nodule at different time-points. State of the art solutions rely on 3D convolutional neural networks built on pulmonary nodules obtained from single CT scan per patient. In this work, we propose a two-stream 3D convolutional neural network that predicts malignancy by jointly analyzing two pulmonary nodule volumes from the same patient taken at different time-points. Best results achieve 77% of F1-score in test with an increment of 9% an…
Eurecat Centre Tecnològic de Catalunya（加泰罗尼亚技术中心）；Universitat Pompeu Fabra（庞培法布拉大学）；Vall d'Hebron University Hospital（瓦尔德希布伦大学医院）；ICREA（加泰罗尼亚高级研究院）
We address the problem of supporting radiologists in the longitudinal management of lung cancer. Therefore, we proposed a deep learning pipeline, composed of four stages that completely automatized from the detection of nodules to the classification of cancer, through the detection of growth in the nodules. In addition, the pipeline integrated a novel approach for nodule growth detection, which relied on a recent hierarchical probabilistic U-Net adapted to report uncertainty estimates. Also, a second novel method was introduced for lung cancer nodule classification, integrating into a two stre…
Eurecat, Centre Tecnològic de Catalunya（加泰罗尼亚技术中心 Eurecat）；Universitat Pompeu Fabra（庞培法布拉大学）；ICREA
The early identification of malignant pulmonary nodules is critical for better lung cancer prognosis and less invasive chemo or radio therapies. Nodule malignancy assessment done by radiologists is extremely useful for planning a preventive intervention but is, unfortunately, a complex, time-consuming and error-prone task. This explains the lack of large datasets containing radiologists malignancy characterization of nodules. In this article, we propose to assess nodule malignancy through 3D convolutional neural networks and to integrate it in an automated end-to-end existing pipeline of lung …
College of Physics and Information Engineering, Fuzhou University（福州大学物理与信息工程学院）；Thoracic Department, Fujian Medical University Union Hospital（福建医科大学附属协和医院胸外科）
Background and Objective:Computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems promote diagnosis effectiveness and alleviate pressure of radiologists. A CAD system for lung cancer diagnosis includes nodule candidate detection and nodule malignancy evaluation. Recently, deep learning-based pulmonary nodule detection has reached satisfactory performance ready for clinical application. However, deep learning-based nodule malignancy evaluation depends on heuristic inference from low-dose computed tomography volume to malignant probability, which lacks clinical cognition. Methods:In this paper, we propose a joint…
School of Medicine, Tsinghua University（清华大学医学院）；Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University（清华大学计算机科学与技术系）
Automatic diagnosing lung cancer from Computed Tomography (CT) scans involves two steps: detect all suspicious lesions (pulmonary nodules) and evaluate the whole-lung/pulmonary malignancy. Currently, there are many studies about the first step, but few about the second step. Since the existence of nodule does not definitely indicate cancer, and the morphology of nodule has a complicated relationship with cancer, the diagnosis of lung cancer demands careful investigations on every suspicious nodule and integration of information of all nodules. We propose a 3D deep neural network to solve this …
Thomas Jefferson University Hospital（托马斯·杰斐逊大学医院）；Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center（纪念斯隆·凯特琳癌症中心）
Spiculations/lobulations, sharp/curved spikes on the surface of lung nodules, are good predictors of lung cancer malignancy and hence, are routinely assessed and reported by radiologists as part of the standardized Lung-RADS clinical scoring criteria. Given the 3D geometry of the nodule and 2D slice-by-slice assessment by radiologists, manual spiculation/lobulation annotation is a tedious task and thus no public datasets exist to date for probing the importance of these clinically-reported features in the SOTA malignancy prediction algorithms. As part of this paper, we release a large-scale Cl…
National Engineering Laboratory for Integrated Aero-Space-Ground-Ocean Big Data Application Technology（国家空天地海一体化大数据应用技术国家工程实验室）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学计算机科学与工程学院）
Lung nodule malignancy prediction is an essential step in the early diagnosis of lung cancer. Besides the difficulties commonly discussed, the challenges of this task also come from the ambiguous labels provided by annotators, since deep learning models may learn, even amplify, the bias embedded in them. In this paper, we propose a multi-view "divide-and-rule" (MV-DAR) model to learn from both reliable and ambiguous annotations for lung nodule malignancy prediction. According to the consistency and reliability of their annotations, we divide nodules into three sets: a consistent and reliable s…
University of Applied Sciences - Wiener Neustadt（维也纳新城应用科学大学）；LAAS-CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心 LAAS 实验室）；Univ de Toulouse（图卢兹大学）
Lung cancer accounts for the highest number of cancer deaths globally. Early diagnosis of lung nodules is very important to reduce the mortality rate of patients by improving the diagnosis and treatment of lung cancer. This work proposes an automated system to classify lung nodules as malignant and benign in CT images. It presents extensive experimental results using a combination of geometric and histogram lung nodule image features and different linear and non-linear discriminant classifiers. The proposed approach is experimentally validated on the LIDC-IDRI public lung cancer screening thor…
Scale-Aware Curriculum Learning for Ddata-Efficient Lung Nodule Detection with YOLOv11
Department of Biomedical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University（生物医学工程系，约翰霍普金斯大学）；Department of Radiation Oncology and Molecular Radiation Sciences, Johns Hopkins University（放射肿瘤学与分子放射科学系，约翰霍普金斯大学）
Vision-Language Model-Based Semantic-Guided Imaging Biomarker for Lung Nodule Malignancy Prediction
organization= Medical \& Imaging Informatics, Department of Radiological Sciences, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA , city= Los Angeles , postcode= 90095 , state= CA , country= USA；organization= Department of Medicine, Division of Pulmonology；Critical Care, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA , city= Los Angeles , postcode= 90095 , state= CA , country= USA
Though large-scale datasets are essential for training deep learning systems, it is expensive to scale up the collection of medical imaging datasets. Synthesizing the objects of interests, such as lung nodules, in medical images based on the distribution of annotated datasets can be helpful for improving the supervised learning tasks, especially when the datasets are limited by size and class balance. In this paper, we propose the class-aware adversarial synthesis framework to synthesize lung nodules in CT images. The framework is built with a coarse-to-fine patch in-painter (generator) and tw…
Lung nodules can be an alarming precursor to potential lung cancer. Missed nodule detections during chest radiograph analysis remains a common challenge among thoracic radiologists. In this work, we present a multi-task lung nodule detection algorithm for chest radiograph analysis. Unlike past approaches, our algorithm predicts a global-level label indicating nodule presence along with local-level labels predicting nodule locations using a Dual Head Network (DHN). We demonstrate the favorable nodule detection performance that our multi-task formulation yields in comparison to conventional meth…
Data availability plays a critical role for the performance of deep learning systems. This challenge is especially acute within the medical image domain, particularly when pathologies are involved, due to two factors: 1) limited number of cases, and 2) large variations in location, scale, and appearance. In this work, we investigate whether augmenting a dataset with artificially generated lung nodules can improve the robustness of the progressive holistically nested network (P-HNN) model for pathological lung segmentation of CT scans. To achieve this goal, we develop a 3D generative adversaria…
Lung nodule proposals generation is the primary step of lung nodule detection and has received much attention in recent years . In this paper, we first construct a model of 3-dimension Convolutional Neural Network (3D CNN) to generate lung nodule proposals, which can achieve the state-of-the-art performance. Then, we analyze a series of key problems concerning the training performance and efficiency. Firstly, we train the 3D CNN model with data in different resolutions and find out that models trained by high resolution input data achieve better lung nodule proposals generation performances es…
Median Technologies（Median科技公司）；Univ. Artois（阿图瓦大学）
Pathologies systematically induce morphological changes, thus providing a major but yet insufficiently quantified source of observables for diagnosis. The study develops a predictive model of the pathological states based on morphological features (3D-morphomics) on Computed Tomography (CT) volumes. A complete workflow for mesh extraction and simplification of an organ's surface is developed, and coupled with an automatic extraction of morphological features given by the distribution of mean curvature and mesh energy. An XGBoost supervised classifier is then trained and tested on the 3D-morpho…
Algotec LTD, a Carestream Co（Algotec有限公司（锐珂公司旗下企业））
Accurate assessment of Lung nodules is a time consuming and error prone ingredient of the radiologist interpretation work. Automating 3D volume detection and segmentation can improve workflow as well as patient care. Previous works have focused either on detecting lung nodules from a full CT scan or on segmenting them from a small ROI. We adapt the state of the art architecture for 2D object detection and segmentation, MaskRCNN, to handle 3D images and employ it to detect and segment lung nodules from CT scans. We report on competitive results for the lung nodule detection on LUNA16 data set. …
We present crowdsourcing as an additional modality to aid radiologists in the diagnosis of lung cancer from clinical chest computed tomography (CT) scans. More specifically, a complete workflow is introduced which can help maximize the sensitivity of lung nodule detection by utilizing the collective intelligence of the crowd. We combine the concept of overlapping thin-slab maximum intensity projections (TS-MIPs) and cine viewing to render short videos that can be outsourced as an annotation task to the crowd. These videos are generated by linearly interpolating overlapping TS-MIPs of CT slices…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；INSA Lyon（里昂国立应用科学学院）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；INSERM（法国国家健康与医学研究院）；Université de Lyon（里昂大学）；Guizhou University（贵州大学）；Shanghai Chest Hospital（上海市胸科医院）
To investigate whether the pleurae, airways and vessels surrounding a nodule on non-contrast computed tomography (CT) can discriminate benign and malignant pulmonary nodules. The LIDC-IDRI dataset, one of the largest publicly available CT database, was exploited for study. A total of 1556 nodules from 694 patients were involved in statistical analysis, where nodules with average scorings <3 and >3 were respectively denoted as benign and malignant. Besides, 339 nodules from 113 patients with diagnosis ground-truth were independently evaluated. Computer algorithms were developed to segment pulmo…
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute（伦斯勒理工学院）；Massachusetts General Hospital（麻省总医院）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）
Although radiographs are the most frequently used worldwide due to their cost-effectiveness and widespread accessibility, the structural superposition along the x-ray paths often renders suspicious or concerning lung nodules difficult to detect. In this study, we apply "X-ray dissectography" to dissect lungs digitally from a few radiographic projections, suppress the interference of irrelevant structures, and improve lung nodule detectability. For this purpose, a collaborative detection network is designed to localize lung nodules in 2D dissected projections and 3D physical space. Our experime…
The Ohio State University（俄亥俄州立大学）；University of Massachusetts Lowell（马萨诸塞大学洛厄尔分校）；Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute（伦斯勒理工学院）
Deep learning, as a promising new area of machine learning, has attracted a rapidly increasing attention in the field of medical imaging. Compared to the conventional machine learning methods, deep learning requires no hand-tuned feature extractor, and has shown a superior performance in many visual object recognition applications. In this study, we develop a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) and apply it to thoracic CT images for the classification of lung nodules. We present the CNN architecture and classification accuracy for the original images of lung nodules. In order to understand…
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）
Accurate lung lesion segmentation from Computed Tomography (CT) images is crucial to the analysis and diagnosis of lung diseases such as COVID-19 and lung cancer. However, the smallness and variety of lung nodules and the lack of high-quality labeling make the accurate lung nodule segmentation difficult. To address these issues, we first introduce a novel segmentation mask named Soft Mask which has richer and more accurate edge details description and better visualization and develop a universal automatic Soft Mask annotation pipeline to deal with different datasets correspondingly. Then, a no…
Reproducible Benchmarking for Lung Nodule Detection and Malignancy Classification Across Multiple Low-Dose CT Datasets
Duke University School of Medicine（杜克大学医学院）；Pratt School of Engineering, Duke University（杜克大学普拉特工程学院）；University of Colorado（科罗拉多大学）；Duke University（杜克大学）
University of Central Florida（中佛罗里达大学）；Florida Hospital（佛罗里达医院）
Discriminating lung nodules as malignant or benign is still an underlying challenge. To address this challenge, radiologists need computer aided diagnosis (CAD) systems which can assist in learning discriminative imaging features corresponding to malignant and benign nodules. However, learning highly discriminative imaging features is an open problem. In this paper, our aim is to learn the most discriminative features pertaining to lung nodules by using an adversarial learning methodology. Specifically, we propose to use unsupervised learning with Deep Convolutional-Generative Adversarial Netw…
Jordan University of Science and Technology（约旦科技大学）
Purpose: The lung nodules localization in CT scan images is the most difficult task due to the complexity of the arbitrariness of shape, size, and texture of lung nodules. This is a challenge to be faced when coming to developing different solutions to improve detection systems. the deep learning approach showed promising results by using convolutional neural network (CNN), especially for image recognition and it's one of the most used algorithm in computer vision. Approach: we use (CNN) building blocks based on YOLOv5 (you only look once) to learn the features representations for nodule detec…
LAND: Lung and Nodule Diffusion for 3D Chest CT Synthesis with Anatomical Guidance
Eurecat, Centre Tecnològic de Catalunya（埃鲁卡特技术中心，加泰罗尼亚技术中心）；Dept. de Matemàtiques i Informàtica, Universitat de Barcelona（巴塞罗那大学数学与计算机系）；Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC)（巴塞罗那超级计算中心）
Parse and Recall: Towards Accurate Lung Nodule Malignancy Prediction like Radiologists
Hupan Lab（湖畔实验室）；DAMO Academy, Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团达摩院）；The First Affiliated Hospital of College of Medicine, Zhejiang University（浙江大学医学院附属第一医院）；Guangdong Provincial People’s Hospital（广东省人民医院）
Kyoto University Graduate School of Medicine（京都大学医学院）；Kyoto University Hospital（京都大学医院）；Osaka Medical College（大阪医科大学）
We aimed to evaluate computer-aided diagnosis (CADx) system for lung nodule classification focusing on (i) usefulness of gradient tree boosting (XGBoost) and (ii) effectiveness of parameter optimization using Bayesian optimization (Tree Parzen Estimator, TPE) and random search. 99 lung nodules (62 lung cancers and 37 benign lung nodules) were included from public databases of CT images. A variant of local binary pattern was used for calculating feature vectors. Support vector machine (SVM) or XGBoost was trained using the feature vectors and their labels. TPE or random search was used for para…
University of Turin（都灵大学）；Fondazione Ricerca Molinette Onlus（莫利内特研究基金会（非营利组织））
The accurate and consistent border segmentation plays an important role in the tumor volume estimation and its treatment in the field of Medical Image Segmentation. Globally, Lung cancer is one of the leading causes of death and the early detection of lung nodules is essential for the early cancer diagnosis and survival rate of patients. The goal of this study was to demonstrate the feasibility of Deephealth toolkit including PyECVL and PyEDDL libraries to precisely segment lung nodules. Experiments for lung nodules segmentation has been carried out on UniToChest using PyECVL and PyEDDL, for d…
Controllable Lung Nodule Synthesis via Histogram-Regularized Latent Diffusion Models
Johns Hopkins University（约翰霍普金斯大学）；Department of Radiology and Nuclear Medicine, University Medical Center Mannheim, Heidelberg University（放射学与核医学科，曼海姆大学医学中心，海德堡大学）
Universitat Rovira i Virgili（罗维拉-威尔吉利大学）；Robert Gordon University（罗伯特戈登大学）；Aswan University（阿斯旺大学）
Lung cancer is deadly cancer that causes millions of deaths every year around the world. Accurate lung nodule detection and segmentation in computed tomography (CT) images is the most important part of diagnosing lung cancer in the early stage. Most of the existing systems are semi-automated and need to manually select the lung and nodules regions to perform the segmentation task. To address these challenges, we proposed a fully automated end-to-end lung nodule detection and segmentation system based on a deep learning approach. In this paper, we used Optimized Faster R-CNN; a state-of-the-art…
Brigham and Women’s Hospital（布莱根妇女医院）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）；Stony Brook University（石溪大学）；Cancer Hospital, Chinese Academy of Medical Science（中国医学科学院肿瘤医院）；China-Japan Friendship Hospital（中日友好医院）；First Affiliated Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University（广州医科大学附属第一医院）
Lung nodules are commonly detected in screening for patients with a risk for lung cancer. Though the status of large nodules can be easily diagnosed by fine needle biopsy or bronchoscopy, small nodules are often difficult to classify on computed tomography (CT). Recent works have shown that shape analysis of lung nodules can be used to differentiate benign lesions from malignant ones, though existing methods are limited in their sensitivity and specificity. In this work we introduced a new 3D shape analysis within the framework of differential geometry to calculate the Wasserstein distance bet…
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）；Tongji University（同济大学）；Sichuan University West China Hospital（四川大学华西医院）；Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）
Lung nodule detection from 3D Computed Tomography scans plays a vital role in efficient lung cancer screening. Despite the SOTA performance obtained by recent anchor-based detectors using CNNs for this task, they require predetermined anchor parameters such as the size, number, and aspect ratio of anchors, and have limited robustness when dealing with lung nodules with a massive variety of sizes. To overcome these problems, we propose a 3D sphere representation-based center-points matching detection network that is anchor-free and automatically predicts the position, radius, and offset of nodu…
Lung nodules are commonly missed in chest radiographs. We propose and evaluate P-AnoGAN, an unsupervised anomaly detection approach for lung nodules in radiographs. P-AnoGAN modifies the fast anomaly detection generative adversarial network (f-AnoGAN) by utilizing a progressive GAN and a convolutional encoder-decoder-encoder pipeline. Model training uses only unlabelled healthy lung patches extracted from the Indiana University Chest X-Ray Collection. External validation and testing are performed using healthy and unhealthy patches extracted from the ChestX-ray14 and Japanese Society for Radio…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Shanghai Chest Hospital（上海市胸科医院）；Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）
Recent evolution in deep learning has proven its value for CT-based lung nodule classification. Most current techniques are intrinsically black-box systems, suffering from two generalizability issues in clinical practice. First, benign-malignant discrimination is often assessed by human observers without pathologic diagnoses at the nodule level. We termed these data as "unsure data". Second, a classifier does not necessarily acquire reliable nodule features for stable learning and robust prediction with patch-level labels during learning. In this study, we construct a sure dataset with patholo…
Lung nodule detection is a class imbalanced problem because nodules are found with much lower frequency than non-nodules. In the class imbalanced problem, conventional classifiers tend to be overwhelmed by the majority class and ignore the minority class. We therefore propose cascaded convolutional neural networks to cope with the class imbalanced problem. In the proposed approach, cascaded convolutional neural networks that perform as selective classifiers filter out obvious non-nodules. Successively, a convolutional neural network trained with a balanced data set calculates nodule probabilit…
In this work we present a method for lung nodules segmentation, their texture classification and subsequent follow-up recommendation from the CT image of lung. Our method consists of neural network model based on popular U-Net architecture family but modified for the joint nodule segmentation and its texture classification tasks and an ensemble-based model for the follow-up recommendation. This solution was evaluated within the LNDb medical imaging challenge and produced the best nodule segmentation result on the final leaderboard.
Early detection of lung cancer is an effective way to improve the survival rate of patients. It is a critical step to have accurate detection of lung nodules in computed tomography (CT) images for the diagnosis of lung cancer. However, due to the heterogeneity of the lung nodules and the complexity of the surrounding environment, robust nodule detection has been a challenging task. In this study, we propose a two-stage convolutional neural network (TSCNN) architecture for lung nodule detection. The CNN architecture in the first stage is based on the improved UNet segmentation network to establ…
