Multi-crop Convolutional Neural Networks for lung nodule malignancy suspiciousness classification

We investigate the problem of lung nodule malignancy suspiciousness (the likelihood of nodule malignancy) classification using thoracic Computed Tomography (CT) images. Unlike traditional studies primarily relying on cautious nodule segmentation and time-consuming feature extraction, we tackle a more challenging task on directly modeling raw nodule patches and building an end-to-end machine-learning architecture for classifying lung nodule malignancy suspiciousness. We present a Multi-crop Convolutional Neural Network (MC-CNN) to automatically extract nodule salient information by employing a novel multi-crop pooling strategy which crops different regions from convolutional feature maps and then applies max-pooling different times. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed method not only achieves state-of-the-art nodule suspiciousness classification performance, but also effectively characterizes nodule semantic attributes (subtlety and margin) and nodule diameter which are potentially helpful in modeling nodule malignancy.