A multi-view deep convolutional neural networks for lung nodule segmentation.

We present a multi-view convolutional neural networks (MV-CNN) for lung nodule segmentation. The MV-CNN specialized in capturing a diverse set of nodule-sensitive features from axial, coronal and sagittal views in CT images simultaneously. The proposed network architecture consists of three CNN branches, where each branch includes seven stacked layers and takes multi-scale nodule patches as input. The three CNN branches are then integrated with a fully connected layer to predict whether the patch center voxel belongs to the nodule. The proposed method has been evaluated on 893 nodules from the public LIDC-IDRI dataset, where ground-truth annotations and CT imaging data were provided. We showed that MV-CNN demonstrated encouraging performance for segmenting various type of nodules including juxta-pleural, cavitary, and non-solid nodules, achieving an average dice similarity coefficient (DSC) of 77.67% and average surface distance (ASD) of 0.24, outperforming conventional image segmentation approaches.