The introduction of lung cancer screening programs will produce an
unprecedented amount of chest CT scans in the near future, which radiologists
will have to read in order to decide on a patient follow-up strategy. According
to the current guidelines, the workup of screen-detected nodules strongly
relies on nodule size and nodule type. In this paper, we present a deep
learning system based on multi-stream multi-scale convolutional networks, which
automatically classifies all nodule types relevant for nodule workup. The
system processes raw CT data containing a nodule without the need for any
additional information such as nodule segmentation or nodule size and learns a
representation of 3D data by analyzing an arbitrary number of 2D views of a
given nodule. The deep learning system was trained with data from the Italian
MILD screening trial and validated on an independent set of data from the
Danish DLCST screening trial. We analyze the advantage of processing nodules at
multiple scales with a multi-stream convolutional network architecture, and we
show that the proposed deep learning system achieves performance at classifying
nodule type that surpasses the one of classical machine learning approaches and
is within the inter-observer variability among four experienced human
observers.

该文章介绍了一种基于多通道多尺度卷积网络的深度学习系统，该系统可以自动分类肺癌结节，从而提高 CT 扫描的结果判断准确率。该系统采用了一个基于多尺度的卷积网络结构，在使用意大利的 MILD 筛查试验数据和丹麦的 DLCST 筛查试验数据进行验证后，其结节识别的准确度已经超过了四名人类识别者的平均水平。