Two-stage lesion detection approach based on dimension-decomposition and 3D context

Lesion detection in Computed Tomography (CT) images is a challenging task in the field of computer-aided diagnosis. An important issue is to locate the area of lesion accurately. As a branch of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), 3D Context-Enhanced (3DCE) frameworks are designed to detect lesions on CT scans. The False Positives (FPs) detected in 3DCE frameworks are usually caused by inaccurate region proposals, which slow down the inference time. To solve the above problems, a new method is proposed, a dimension-decomposition region proposal network is integrated into 3DCE framework to improve the location accuracy in lesion detection. Without the restriction of "anchors" on ratios and scales, anchors are decomposed to independent "anchor strings". Anchor segments are dynamically combined in accordance with probability, and anchor strings with different lengths dynamically compose bounding boxes. Experiments show that the accurate region proposals generated by our model promote the sensitivity of FPs and spend less inference time compared with the current methods.