A Data Augmentation Method and the Embedding Mechanism for Detection and Classification of Pulmonary Nodules on Small Samples

Detection of pulmonary nodules by CT is used for screening lung cancer in early stages.omputer aided diagnosis (CAD) based on deep-learning method can identify the suspected areas of pulmonary nodules in CT images, thus improving the accuracy and efficiency of CT diagnosis. The accuracy and robustness of deep learning models. Method:In this paper, we explore (1) the data augmentation method based on the generation model and (2) the model structure improvement method based on the embedding mechanism. Two strategies have been introduced in this study: a new data augmentation method and a embedding mechanism. In the augmentation method, a 3D pixel-level statistics algorithm is proposed to generate pulmonary nodule and by combing the faked pulmonary nodule and healthy lung, we generate new pulmonary nodule samples. The embedding mechanism are designed to better understand the meaning of pixels of the pulmonary nodule samples by introducing hidden variables. Result: The result of the 3DVNET model with the augmentation method for pulmonary nodule detection shows that the proposed data augmentation method outperforms the method based on generative adversarial network (GAN) framework, training accuracy improved by 1.5%, and with embedding mechanism for pulmonary nodules classification shows that the embedding mechanism improves the accuracy and robustness for the classification of pulmonary nodules obviously, the model training accuracy is close to 1 and the model testing F1-score is 0.90.Conclusion:he proposed data augmentation method and embedding mechanism are beneficial to improve the accuracy and robustness of the model, and can be further applied in other common diagnostic imaging tasks.