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A manifold learning regularization approach to enhance 3D CT image-based lung nodule classification

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International Journal of Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Purpose

Diagnosis of lung cancer requires radiologists to review every lung nodule in CT images. Such a process can be very time-consuming, and the accuracy is affected by many factors, such as experience of radiologists and available diagnosis time. To address this problem, we proposed to develop a deep learning-based system to automatically classify benign and malignant lung nodules.

Methods

The proposed method automatically determines benignity or malignancy given the 3D CT image patch of a lung nodule to assist diagnosis process. Motivated by the fact that real structure among data is often embedded on a low-dimensional manifold, we developed a novel manifold regularized classification deep neural network (MRC-DNN) to perform classification directly based on the manifold representation of lung nodule images. The concise manifold representation revealing important data structure is expected to benefit the classification, while the manifold regularization enforces strong, but natural constraints on network training, preventing over-fitting.

Results

The proposed method achieves accurate manifold learning with reconstruction error of ~ 30 HU on real lung nodule CT image data. In addition, the classification accuracy on testing data is 0.90 with sensitivity of 0.81 and specificity of 0.95, which outperforms state-of-the-art deep learning methods.

Conclusion

The proposed MRC-DNN facilitates an accurate manifold learning approach for lung nodule classification based on 3D CT images. More importantly, MRC-DNN suggests a new and effective idea of enforcing regularization for network training, possessing the potential impact to a board range of applications.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the China National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant Nos. 2016YFE0125200 and 2016YFC0101100) and the China Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant No. 2019CDQYGD020).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Neurology, Heilongjiang Province Number III Hospital, Beian, 164000, Heilongjiang, China

    Ying Ren

  2. Innovative Technology Of Radiotherapy Computations and Hardware (iTORCH) Laboratory, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX, 75235, USA

    Min-Yu Tsai, Xun Jia & Chenyang Shen

  3. Medical Artificial Intelligence and Automation (MAIA) Laboratory, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX, 75235, USA

    Min-Yu Tsai, Liyuan Chen, Jing Wang, Shulong Li, Xun Jia & Chenyang Shen

  4. Department of Radiation Oncology, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX, 75235, USA

    Min-Yu Tsai, Liyuan Chen, Jing Wang, Xun Jia & Chenyang Shen

  5. Key Laboratory of Optoelectronic Technology and Systems, Ministry of Education, Chongqing University, Chongqing, 400044, China

    Yufei Liu

  6. Centre for Intelligent Sensing Technology, College of Optoelectronic Engineering, Chongqing University, Chongqing, 400044, China

    Yufei Liu

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  1. Ying Ren
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Correspondence to Xun Jia or Chenyang Shen.

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Ren, Y., Tsai, MY., Chen, L. et al. A manifold learning regularization approach to enhance 3D CT image-based lung nodule classification. Int J CARS 15, 287–295 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11548-019-02097-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11548-019-02097-8

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