Title: Comparison of machine learning methods for classifying mediastinal lymph node metastasis of non-small cell lung cancer from 18F-FDG PET/CT images,
Abstract: The present study shows that the performance of CNN is not significantly
different from the best classical methods and human doctors for classifying
mediastinal lymph node metastasis of NSCLC from PET/CT images. Because CNN does
not need tumor segmentation or feature calculation, it is more convenient and
more objective than the classical methods. However, CNN does not make use of
the import diagnostic features, which have been proved more discriminative than
the texture features for classifying small-sized lymph nodes. Therefore,
incorporating the diagnostic features into CNN is a promising direction for
future research.