In this paper, we propose a novel framework with 3D convolutional networks (ConvNets) for automated detection of pulmonary nodules from low-dose CT scans, which is a challenging yet crucial task for lung cancer early diagnosis and treatment. Different from previous standard ConvNets, we try to tackle the severe hard/easy sample imbalance problem in medical datasets and explore the benefits of localized annotations to regularize the learning, and hence boost the performance of ConvNets to achieve more accurate detections. Our proposed framework consists of two stages: 1) candidate screening, and 2) false positive reduction. In the first stage, we establish a 3D fully convolutional network, effectively trained with an online sample filtering scheme, to sensitively and rapidly screen the nodule candidates. In the second stage, we design a hybrid-loss residual network which harnesses the location and size information as important cues to guide the nodule recognition procedure. Experimental results on the public large-scale LUNA16 dataset demonstrate superior performance of our proposed method compared with state-of-the-art approaches for the pulmonary nodule detection task.

本文提出了一种基于 3D 卷积神经网络的新型框架，用于自动检测低剂量 CT 扫描中的肺结节，旨在解决医学数据集中严重的艰难/易样本不平衡问题，并探索局部注释对学习的利益，从而提高性能，实现更准确的检测。我们的框架包括两个阶段：一是候选筛选，二是假阳性降低。在公共大规模 LUNA16 数据集上进行的实验结果表明，我们提出的方法与最先进的肺结节检测方法相比具有卓越的性能。

基于在线样本过滤和混合损失残差学习的3D ConvNets自动肺结节检测