Zhinbin Liao

Guohui Cai, Ruicheng Zhang, Hongyang He et al.

Pulmonary nodules are critical indicators for the early diagnosis of lung cancer, making their detection essential for timely treatment. However, traditional CT imaging methods suffered from cumbersome procedures, low detection rates, and poor localization accuracy. The subtle differences between pulmonary nodules and surrounding tissues in complex lung CT images, combined with repeated downsampling in feature extraction networks, often lead to missed or false detections of small nodules. Existing methods such as FPN, with its fixed feature fusion and limited receptive field, struggle to effectively overcome these issues. To address these challenges, our paper proposed three key contributions: Firstly, we proposed MSDet, a multiscale attention and receptive field network for detecting tiny pulmonary nodules. Secondly, we proposed the extended receptive domain (ERD) strategy to capture richer contextual information and reduce false positives caused by nodule occlusion. We also proposed the position channel attention mechanism (PCAM) to optimize feature learning and reduce multiscale detection errors, and designed the tiny object detection block (TODB) to enhance the detection of tiny nodules. Lastly, we conducted thorough experiments on the public LUNA16 dataset, achieving state-of-the-art performance, with an mAP improvement of 8.8% over the previous state-of-the-art method YOLOv8. These advancements significantly boosted detection accuracy and reliability, providing a more effective solution for early lung cancer diagnosis. The code will be available at https://github.com/CaiGuoHui123/MSDet

Guohui Cai, Ying Cai, Zeyu Zhang et al.

Lung cancer remains one of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality worldwide, making early diagnosis critical for improving therapeutic outcomes and patient prognosis. Computer-aided diagnosis systems, which analyze computed tomography images, have proven effective in detecting and classifying pulmonary nodules, significantly enhancing the detection rate of early-stage lung cancer. Although traditional machine learning algorithms have been valuable, they exhibit limitations in handling complex sample data. The recent emergence of deep learning has revolutionized medical image analysis, driving substantial advancements in this field. This review focuses on recent progress in deep learning for pulmonary nodule detection, segmentation, and classification. Traditional machine learning methods, such as support vector machines and k-nearest neighbors, have shown limitations, paving the way for advanced approaches like Convolutional Neural Networks, Recurrent Neural Networks, and Generative Adversarial Networks. The integration of ensemble models and novel techniques is also discussed, emphasizing the latest developments in lung cancer diagnosis. Deep learning algorithms, combined with various analytical techniques, have markedly improved the accuracy and efficiency of pulmonary nodule analysis, surpassing traditional methods, particularly in nodule classification. Although challenges remain, continuous technological advancements are expected to further strengthen the role of deep learning in medical diagnostics, especially for early lung cancer detection and diagnosis. A comprehensive list of lung cancer detection models reviewed in this work is available at https://github.com/CaiGuoHui123/Awesome-Lung-Cancer-Detection.