Title: Highly accurate model for prediction of lung nodule malignancy with CT scans,
Abstract: Computed tomography (CT) examinations are commonly used to predict lung
nodule malignancy in patients, which are shown to improve noninvasive early
diagnosis of lung cancer. It remains challenging for computational approaches
to achieve performance comparable to experienced radiologists. Here we present
NoduleX, a systematic approach to predict lung nodule malignancy from CT data,
based on deep learning convolutional neural networks (CNN). For training and
validation, we analyze >1000 lung nodules in images from the LIDC/IDRI cohort.
All nodules were identified and classified by four experienced thoracic
radiologists who participated in the LIDC project. NoduleX achieves high
accuracy for nodule malignancy classification, with an AUC of ~0.99. This is
commensurate with the analysis of the dataset by experienced radiologists. Our
approach, NoduleX, provides an effective framework for highly accurate nodule
malignancy prediction with the model trained on a large patient population. Our
results are replicable with software available at
this http URL.