Universal Lesion Detection in CT Scans using Neural Network Ensembles
This work addresses the challenge of lesion detection in CT scans for radiologists, who often miss small lesions, but it is incremental as it builds on existing state-of-the-art methods with improvements.
The paper tackled the problem of detecting lesions in CT scans to aid radiologists in sizing and distinguishing metastatic from non-metastatic lesions, achieving a precision of 65.17% and sensitivity of 91.67% at 4 false positives per image.
In clinical practice, radiologists are reliant on the lesion size when distinguishing metastatic from non-metastatic lesions. A prerequisite for lesion sizing is their detection, as it promotes the downstream assessment of tumor spread. However, lesions vary in their size and appearance in CT scans, and radiologists often miss small lesions during a busy clinical day. To overcome these challenges, we propose the use of state-of-the-art detection neural networks to flag suspicious lesions present in the NIH DeepLesion dataset for sizing. Additionally, we incorporate a bounding box fusion technique to minimize false positives (FP) and improve detection accuracy. Finally, to resemble clinical usage, we constructed an ensemble of the best detection models to localize lesions for sizing with a precision of 65.17% and sensitivity of 91.67% at 4 FP per image. Our results improve upon or maintain the performance of current state-of-the-art methods for lesion detection in challenging CT scans.