Change descriptors for determining nodule malignancy in national lung screening trial CT screening images

Abstract

Pulmonary nodules are effectively diagnosed in CT scans, but determining their malignancy has been a challenge. The rate of change of the volume of a pulmonary nodule is known to be a prognostic factor for cancer development.In this study, we propose that other changes in imaging characteristics are similarly informative.We examined the combination of image features across multiple CT scans, taken from the National Lung Screening Trial, with individual scans of the same patient separated by approximately one year. By subtracting the values of existing features in multiple scans for the same patient, we were able to improve the ability of existing classification algorithms to determine whether a nodule will become malignant. We trained each classifier on 83 nodules determined to be malignant by biopsy and 172 nodules determined to be benign by their clinical stability through two years of no change; classifiers were tested on 77 malignant and 144 benign nodules, using a set of features that in a test-retest experiment were shown to be stable.An accuracy of 83.71% and AUC of 0.814 were achieved with the Random Forests classifier on a subset of features determined to be stable via test-retest reproducibility analysis, further reduced with the Correlationbased Feature Selection algorithm.

Improving malignancy prediction through feature selection informed by nodule size ranges in NLST

“…As before, for comparison results from the case where all the data is used and the case where classifiers are trained and tested on subsets of Cohort 1 and 2 respectively, we used the settings from the previous work [23] and for testing used subsets of Cohort 2.…”