Computer methods and programs in biomedicine
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Comput Methods Programs Biomed · Oct 2018
Single-view 2D CNNs with fully automatic non-nodule categorization for false positive reduction in pulmonary nodule detection.
In pulmonary nodule detection, the first stage, candidate detection, aims to detect suspicious pulmonary nodules. However, detected candidates include many false positives and thus in the following stage, false positive reduction, such false positives are reliably reduced. Note that this task is challenging due to 1) the imbalance between the numbers of nodules and non-nodules and 2) the intra-class diversity of non-nodules. Although techniques using 3D convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown promising performance, they suffer from high computational complexity which hinders constructing deep networks. To efficiently address these problems, we propose a novel framework using the ensemble of 2D CNNs using single views, which outperforms existing 3D CNN-based methods. ⋯ We presented a novel false positive reduction framework, the ensemble of single-view 2D CNNs with fully automatic non-nodule categorization, for pulmonary nodule detection. Unlike previous 3D CNN-based frameworks, we utilized 2D CNNs using 2D single views to improve computational efficiency. Also, our training scheme using categorized non-nodules, extends the learning capability of representative features of different non-nodules. Our framework achieved state-of-the-art performance with low computational complexity.