Classification of lung nodules based on CT images using squeeze-and-excitation network and aggregated residual transformations

Lung cancer is pointed as a leading cause of cancer death worldwide. Early lung nodule diagnosis has great significance for treating lung cancer and increasing patient survival. In this paper, we present a novel method to classify the malignant from benign lung nodules based on CT images using squeeze-and-excitation network and aggregated residual transformations (SE-ResNeXt). The state-of-the-art SE-ResNeXt module, which integrates the advantages of SENet for feature recalibration and ResNeXt for feature reuse, has great ability in boosting feature discriminability on imaging pattern recognition. The method is evaluated on the public available LUng Nodule Analysis 2016 (LUNA16) database with 1004 (450 malignant and 554 benign) nodules, achieving an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0. 9563 and accuracy of 91.67%. The promising results demonstrate that our method has strong robustness in the classification of nodules. The method has the potential to help radiologists better interpret diagnostic data and differentiate the benign from malignant lung nodules on CT images in clinical practice. To our best knowledge, the effectiveness of SE-ResNeXt on lung nodule classification has not been extensively explored.