Pulmonary Nodule Detection Based on Three-Dimensional Multiscale Convolutional Neural Network with Channel and Spatial Attention

Abstract

Early screening for pulmonary nodules is currently an important means for reducing lung cancer mortality. In recent years, three-dimensional convolutional neural networks have achieved great success in the field of pulmonary nodule detection. This paper proposes a pulmonary nodule detection method based on a threedimensional multiscale convolutional neural network with channel and spatial attention. First, a multiscale module is designed to extract the image features at different scales. Second, a channel and spatial attention module is designed to mine the correlation information between features from the perspective of space and channel. Then the extracted features are sent to a pyramid-like fusion mechanism, so that the features contain both deep semantic information and shallow position information, which is conducive to object positioning and bounding box regression. In general, the experiments on the LUng Nodule Analysis 2016 (LUNA16) dataset show that the average free-response receiver operating characteristic (FROC) score is 0.846. Compared with other current advanced methods, the method is competitive and effective.