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A "sign" on a lung CT image refers to a radiologic finding that suggests a pathological progression of some specific disease. Analysis of CT signs is helpful to understand the pathological origin of the lesion. In-depth study of lung nodules classification with different CT signs will help to distinguish benign and malignant nodules more clearly and accurately. To this end, we propose an Inception module-based ensemble classification method for pulmonary nodule diagnosis with different nodule signs. We first construct a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) classifier adopting Inception modules and pre-train it on ImageNet. We then fine-tune this pre-trained classifier on 10 different lung nodule sign sample sets, and fuse these 10 classifiers with an artificial immune ensemble algorithm. The overall sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy of our proposed Artificial Immune Algorithm-based Inception Networks Fusion (AIA-INF) algorithm are 82.22%, 93.17%, and 88.67%, respectively, which are significantly higher than those of the alternative Bagging and Boosting methods. The experimental results show that our Inception-based ensemble classifier offers promising performance, and compared with other CADx systems, this scheme can offer a more detailed reference for diagnosis, and can be valuable for junior radiologist training.


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An Inception Module CNN Classifiers Fusion Method on Pulmonary Nodule Diagnosis by Signs

Show Author's information Guangyuan Zheng( )Guanghui HanNouman Qadeer Soomro
Beijing Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Technology, School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China
School of Information Technology, Shangqiu Normal University, Shangqiu 476000, China.
School of Biomedical Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510006, China.
Department of Software Engineering, Mehran University of Engineering and Technology, SZAB Campus, Khairpur Mir’s, 66020, Pakistan.

Abstract

A "sign" on a lung CT image refers to a radiologic finding that suggests a pathological progression of some specific disease. Analysis of CT signs is helpful to understand the pathological origin of the lesion. In-depth study of lung nodules classification with different CT signs will help to distinguish benign and malignant nodules more clearly and accurately. To this end, we propose an Inception module-based ensemble classification method for pulmonary nodule diagnosis with different nodule signs. We first construct a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) classifier adopting Inception modules and pre-train it on ImageNet. We then fine-tune this pre-trained classifier on 10 different lung nodule sign sample sets, and fuse these 10 classifiers with an artificial immune ensemble algorithm. The overall sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy of our proposed Artificial Immune Algorithm-based Inception Networks Fusion (AIA-INF) algorithm are 82.22%, 93.17%, and 88.67%, respectively, which are significantly higher than those of the alternative Bagging and Boosting methods. The experimental results show that our Inception-based ensemble classifier offers promising performance, and compared with other CADx systems, this scheme can offer a more detailed reference for diagnosis, and can be valuable for junior radiologist training.

Keywords: Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), lung cancer, sign, pulmonary nodule, Artificial Immune Algorithm (AIA)

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Received: 08 November 2018
Revised: 11 March 2019
Accepted: 12 March 2019
Published: 07 October 2019
Issue date: June 2020

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