Automatic Detection of Lung Nodules on Computer Tomography Scans with a Deep Direct Regression Method

Abstract

Deep-learning-based approaches have been extensively used in detecting pulmonary nodules from computer Tomography (CT) scans. In this study, an automated end-to-end framework with a convolution network (Conv-net) has been proposed to detect lung nodules from CT images. Here, boundary regression has been performed by a direct regression method, in which the offset is predicted from a given point. The proposed framework has two outputs; a pixel-wise classification between nodule or normal and a direct regression which is used to determine the four coordinates of the nodule's bounding box. The Loss function includes two terms; one for classification and the other for regression. The performance of the proposed method is compared with YOLOv2. The evaluation has been performed using Lung-Pet-CT-DX dataset. The experimental results show that the proposed framework outperforms the YOLOv2 method. The results demonstrate that the proposed framework possesses high accuracies of nodule localization and boundary estimation.

Keywords

• lung nodule detection
• direct regression
• deep learning