Lung nodule detection algorithm based on rank correlation causal structure learning

Early diagnosis can significantly improve the survival rate of lung cancer patients. This study attempts to construct a causal structure network between the computational and semantic features of lung nodules through causal discovery algorithms, and to detect and prevent lung nodules based on this network. For complex and diverse lung nodule data sets, this paper proposes a new causal lung nodule detection algorithm Tau-CSFS in combination with rank correlation methods. The algorithm can effectively mine the causal relationship among lung cancer data that obey the non-linear non-Gaussian distribution, and the mixture of continuous and discrete variables, and has good predictive performance. We made three main contributions. First, we proved that the Kendall rank correlation coefficient that does not require data distribution can be used as a standard for independence test. Second, we applied Kendall rank correlation to Bayesian structure learning, and proposed a new causal discovery algorithm: Tau-CS algorithm based on hypothesis testing. The third contribution is to combine the Tau-CS algorithm with the feature selection method, and further propose the Tau-CSFS algorithm, which solves the problem of causality mining and diagnosis detection of lung nodule data. In the experiment, the Tau CS algorithm is compared with the prior art on 7 Bayesian networks on the additive noise structure model, and it is proved that the algorithm has a better accuracy of causal structure learning. Finally, in the lung nodule detection stage, using the processed LIDC data set to perform two-classification and multi-classification experiments on seven semantic categories, the average accuracy of the Tau-CSFS algorithm reached 85.84% and 83.32%. The Tau-CSFS algorithm are better than comparable similar algorithms in the comprehensive performance index. The results show that the proposed algorithm has good detection performance and wide application prospects.