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An Embedded Multi-branch 3D Convolution Neural Network for False Positive Reduction in Lung Nodule Detection

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Abstract

Numerous lung nodule candidates can be produced through an automated lung nodule detection system. Classifying these candidates to reduce false positives is an important step in the detection process. The objective during this paper is to predict real nodules from a large number of pulmonary nodule candidates. Facing the challenge of the classification task, we propose a novel 3D convolution neural network (CNN) to reduce false positives in lung nodule detection. The novel 3D CNN includes embedded multiple branches in its structure. Each branch processes a feature map from a layer with different depths. All of these branches are cascaded at their ends; thus, features from different depth layers are combined to predict the categories of candidates. The proposed method obtains a competitive score in lung nodule candidate classification on LUNA16 dataset with an accuracy of 0.9783, a sensitivity of 0.8771, a precision of 0.9426, and a specificity of 0.9925. Moreover, a good performance on the competition performance metric (CPM) is also obtained with a score of 0.830. As a 3D CNN, the proposed model can learn complete and three-dimensional discriminative information about nodules and non-nodules to avoid some misidentification problems caused due to lack of spatial correlation information extracted from traditional methods or 2D networks. As an embedded multi-branch structure, the model is also more effective in recognizing the nodules of various shapes and sizes. As a result, the proposed method gains a competitive score on the false positive reduction in lung nodule detection and can be used as a reference for classifying nodule candidates.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the LUNA16 challenge organizers for providing the dataset and evaluation software.

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under Project 61471123 and the Research Foundation of Education Bureau of Hunan Province of China under Project 13C829.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The School of Instrumentation and Optoelectronics Engineering, Beihang University, 37 Xueyuan Road, Haidian District, Beijing, 100083, China

    Wangxia Zuo, Fuqiang Zhou & Yuzhu He

  2. The College of Electrical Engineering, University of South China, Hengyang, 421001, Hunan, China

    Wangxia Zuo

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  1. Wangxia Zuo
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  2. Fuqiang Zhou
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  3. Yuzhu He
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Correspondence to Fuqiang Zhou.

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Zuo, W., Zhou, F. & He, Y. An Embedded Multi-branch 3D Convolution Neural Network for False Positive Reduction in Lung Nodule Detection. J Digit Imaging 33, 846–857 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10278-020-00326-0

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