Evaluation of Malignancy of Lung Nodules from CT Image Using Recurrent Neural Network

The efficacy of treatment of cancer depends largely on early detection and correct prognosis. It is more important in case of pulmonary cancer, where the detection is based on identifying malignant nodules in the Computed Tomography (CT) scans of the lung. There are two problems for making correct decision about malignancy: (1) At early stage, the nodule size is small (length 5 to 10 mm). As the CT scan covers a volume of 30cm. × 30cm. × 40cm., manually searching for nodules takes a very long time (approximately 10 minutes for an expert). (2) There are benign nodules and nodules due to other ailments like bronchitis, pneumonia, tuberculosis. To identify whether the nodule is carcinogenic needs long experience and expertise. In recent years, several works have been reported to classify lung cancer using not only the CT scan image, but also other features causing or related to cancer. In all recent works, for CT image analysis, 3-D Convolution Neural Network (CNN) is used to identify cancerous nodules. In spite of various preprocessing used to improve training efficiency, 3-D CNN is extremely slow. The aim of this work is to improve training efficiency by proposing a new deep NN model. It consists of a hierarchical (sliced) structure of recurrent neural network (RNN), where different layers of the hierarchy can be trained simultaneously, decreasing training time. In addition, selective attention (alignment) during training improves convergence rate. The result shows a 3-fold increase in training efficiency, compared to recent state-of-the-art work using 3-D CNN.