A Pulmonary Nodule Detection Method Based on Residual Learning and Dense Connection

Pulmonary nodule detection using chest CT scan is an essential but challenging step towards the early diagnosis of lung cancer. Although a number of deep learning-based methods have been published in the literature, these methods still suffer from less accuracy. In this paper, we propose a novel pulmonary module detection method, which uses a 3D residual U-Net (3D RU-Net) for nodule candidate detection and a 3D densely connected CNN (3D DC-Net) for false positive reduction. 3D RU-Net contains residual blocks in both contracting and expansive paths, and 3D DC-Net leverages three dense blocks to facilitate gradients flow. We evaluated our method on the benchmark LUng Nodule Analysis 2016 (LUNA16) dataset and achieved a CPM score of 0.941, which is higher than those achieved by five competing methods. Our results suggest that the proposed method can effectively detect pulmonary nodules on chest CT.