Wide Residual Network for Lung-Rads™ Screening Referral

Lung cancer has an increasing preponderance in worldwide mortality, demanding for the development of efficient screening methods. With this in mind, a binary classification method using Lung-RADS
^TM
guidelines to warn changes in the screening management is proposed. First, having into account the lack of public datasets for this task, the lung nodules in the LIDC-IDRI dataset were re-annotated to include a Lung-RADS
^TM
-based referral label. Then, a wide residual network is used for automatically assessing lung nodules in 3D chest computed tomography exams. Unlike the standard malignancy prediction approaches, the proposed method avoids the need to segment and characterize lung nodules, and instead directly defines if a patient should be submitted for further lung cancer tests. The system achieves a nodule-wise accuracy of 0.87±0.02.