An Improved Region-based Fully Convolutional Network for Automatic Pulmonary Nodules Detection

Clinical studies show that the survival rate of lung cancer is up to over 90% within 5 years, if the malignant pulmonary tumor is found at early stage. There are two tasks to find the early malignant pulmonary nodules. One is to detect pulmonary nodules, and the other is to recognize their benign or malignancy. This paper focuses on how to detect pulmonary nodules from CT images. In order to detect pulmonary nodules, this paper proposes an improved region-based convolutional network by using Resnet50 for extracting the deeper features of pulmonary nodules and a resetting sliding window for detecting the small size pulmonary nodules. The experimental results show that the proposal not only get a good detection accuracy but also reduce detection time of pulmonary nodules. Single slice detection time is 0.15 second by the LIDC-IDRI database.