Pulmonary nodule detection using low-dose Computed Tomography (CT) is often the first step in lung disease screening and diagnosis. Recently, algorithms based on deep convolutional neural nets have shown great promise for automated nodule detection. Most of the existing deep learning nodule detection systems are constructed in two steps: a) nodule candidates screening and b) false positive reduction, using two different models trained separately. Although it is commonly adopted, the two-step approach not only imposes significant resource overhead on training two independent deep learning models, but also is sub-optimal because it prevents cross-talk between the two. In this work, we present an end-to-end framework for nodule detection, integrating nodule candidate screening and false positive reduction into one model, trained jointly. We demonstrate that the end-to-end system improves the performance by 3.88\% over the two-step approach, while at the same time reducing model complexity by one third and cutting inference time by 3.6 fold. Code will be made publicly available.

本研究提出一种将肺结节候选筛选和假阳性降低整合成一个模型的端到端框架，与现有的两步法相比，该框架不仅提高了性能，还减少了复杂性，降低了推理时间。

一种集成肺结节检测和假阳性减少的端到端框架