Early detection of pulmonary nodules in computed tomography (CT) images is essential for successful outcomes among lung cancer patients. Much attention has been given to deep convolutional neural network (DCNN)-based approaches to this task, but models have relied at least partly on 2D or 2.5D components for inherently 3D data. In this paper, we introduce a novel DCNN approach, consisting of two stages, that is fully three-dimensional end-to-end and utilizes the state-of-the-art in object detection. First, nodule candidates are identified with a U-Net-inspired 3D Faster R-CNN trained using online hard negative mining. Second, false positive reduction is performed by 3D DCNN classifiers trained on difficult examples produced during candidate screening. Finally, we introduce a method to ensemble models from both stages via consensus to give the final predictions. By using this framework, we ranked first of 2887 teams in Season One of Alibaba's 2017 TianChi AI Competition for Healthcare.

本文提出了一种新颖的三维卷积神经网络方法，采用对象检测以及 false positive reduction 等方式来识别计算机断层扫描图像中的肺结节，该方法在 Alibaba's 2017 TianChi AI 大赛中获得了第一名。

基于三维深度卷积神经网络的自动肺结节检测