Lung nodule detection using 3D convolutional neural networks trained on weakly labeled data

Rushil Anirudh; Jayaraman J. Thiagarajan; Timo Bremer; Hyojin Kim

doi:10.1117/12.2214876

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24 March 2016 Lung nodule detection using 3D convolutional neural networks trained on weakly labeled data

Rushil Anirudh, Jayaraman J. Thiagarajan, Timo Bremer, Hyojin Kim

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Proceedings Volume 9785, Medical Imaging 2016: Computer-Aided Diagnosis; 978532 (2016) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2214876
Event: SPIE Medical Imaging, 2016, San Diego, California, United States

Abstract

Early detection of lung nodules is currently the one of the most effective ways to predict and treat lung cancer. As a result, the past decade has seen a lot of focus on computer aided diagnosis (CAD) of lung nodules, whose goal is to efficiently detect, segment lung nodules and classify them as being benign or malignant. Effective detection of such nodules remains a challenge due to their arbitrariness in shape, size and texture. In this paper, we propose to employ 3D convolutional neural networks (CNN) to learn highly discriminative features for nodule detection in lieu of hand-engineered ones such as geometric shape or texture. While 3D CNNs are promising tools to model the spatio-temporal statistics of data, they are limited by their need for detailed 3D labels, which can be prohibitively expensive when compared obtaining 2D labels. Existing CAD methods rely on obtaining detailed labels for lung nodules, to train models, which is also unrealistic and time consuming. To alleviate this challenge, we propose a solution wherein the expert needs to provide only a point label, i.e., the central pixel of of the nodule, and its largest expected size. We use unsupervised segmentation to grow out a 3D region, which is used to train the CNN. Using experiments on the SPIE-LUNGx dataset, we show that the network trained using these weak labels can produce reasonably low false positive rates with a high sensitivity, even in the absence of accurate 3D labels.

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Rushil Anirudh, Jayaraman J. Thiagarajan, Timo Bremer, and Hyojin Kim "Lung nodule detection using 3D convolutional neural networks trained on weakly labeled data", Proc. SPIE 9785, Medical Imaging 2016: Computer-Aided Diagnosis, 978532 (24 March 2016); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2214876

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