Abstract
Lung cancer is one of the most common and fatal types of cancer, and pulmonary nodule detection plays a crucial role in the screening and diagnosis of this disease. A well-trained deep neural network model can help doctors to find nodules on computed tomography(CT) images while requiring lots of labeled data. However, currently available annotating systems are not suitable for annotating pulmonary nodules in CT images. We propose a web-based lung nodules annotating system named as DeepLNAnno. DeepLNAnno has a unique three-tier working process and loads of features like semi-automatic annotation, which not only make it much easier for doctors to annotate compared to some other annotating systems but also increase the accuracy of the labels. We invited a medical group from West China Hospital to annotate the CT images using our DeepLNAnno system, and collected a large number of labeled data. The results of our experiments demonstrated that a usable nodule-detection system is developed, and good benchmark scores on our evaluation data are obtained.







Similar content being viewed by others
References
Armato, S. G., McLennan, G., Bidaut, L., McNitt-Gray, M. F., Meyer, C. R., Reeves, A. P., Zhao, B., Aberle, D. R., Henschke, C. I., Hoffman, E. A., et al., The lung image database consortium (lidc) and image database resource initiative (idri): a completed reference database of lung nodules on ct scans. Med. Phys. 38(2):915–931, 2011.
Chen, W., Zheng, R., Baade, P. D., Zhang, S., Zeng, H., Bray, F., Jemal, A., Yu, X. Q., and He, J., Cancer statistics in china, 2015. CA Cancer J. Clin. 66(2):115–132, 2016.
Jacobs, C., van Rikxoort, E. M., Twellmann, T., Scholten, E. T., de Jong, P. A., Kuhnigk, J. M., Oudkerk, M., de Koning, H. J., Prokop, M., Schaefer-Prokop, C., et al., Automatic detection of subsolid pulmonary nodules in thoracic computed tomography images. Med. Image Anal. 18(2):374–384, 2014.
Liao, F., Liang, M., Li, Z., Hu, X., and Song, S.: Evaluate the malignancy of pulmonary nodules using the 3d deep leaky noisy-or network. arXiv:1711.08324, 2017
Marques, O., and Barman, N.: Semi-automatic semantic annotation of images using machine learning techniques. In: International Semantic Web Conference, pp. 550–565. Springer, 2003.
Pianykh, O. S., Digital imaging and communications in medicine (DICOM): a practical introduction and survival guide. Berlin: Springer, 2009.
Rowley, H. A., Baluja, S., and Kanade, T.: Human face detection in visual scenes. In: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, pp. 875–881, 1996.
Russell, B. C., Torralba, A., Murphy, K. P., and Freeman, W. T., Labelme: a database and web-based tool for image annotation. Int. J. Comput. Vis. 77(1-3):157–173, 2008.
Setio, A. A. A., Ciompi, F., Litjens, G., Gerke, P., Jacobs, C., van Riel, S. J., Wille, M. M. W., Naqibullah, M., Sánchez, C. I., and van Ginneken, B., Pulmonary nodule detection in ct images: false positive reduction using multi-view convolutional networks. IEEE Trans. Med. Imaging 35(5):1160–1169, 2016. 10.1109/TMI.2016.2536809.
Setio, A. A. A., Traverso, A., De Bel, T., Berens, M. S., van den Bogaard, C., Cerello, P., Chen, H., Dou, Q., Fantacci, M. E., Geurts, B., et al., Validation, comparison, and combination of algorithms for automatic detection of pulmonary nodules in computed tomography images: the luna16 challenge. Med. Image Anal. 42:1–13, 2017.
Torralba, A., Russell, B. C., and Yuen, J., Labelme: online image annotation and applications. Proc. IEEE 98(8):1467–1484, 2010.
Torralba, A., and Sinha, P.: Detecting faces in impoverished images. Tech. rep. MASSACHUSETTS INST OF TECH CAMBRIDGE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE LAB, 2001
Turk, M., and Pentland, A., Eigenfaces for recognition. J. Cogn. Neurosci. 3(1):71–86, 1991.
Wenyin, L., Dumais, S. T., Sun, Y., Zhang, H., Czerwinski, M., and Field, B. A.: Semi-automatic image annotation. In: Interact, Vol. 1, pp. 326–333, 2001.
Yushkevich, P. A., Piven, J., Cody Hazlett, H., Gimpel Smith, R., Ho, S., Gee, J. C., and Gerig, G., User-guided 3D active contour segmentation of anatomical structures: significantly improved efficiency and reliability. Neuroimage 31(3):1116–1128, 2006.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 61432012 and U1435213 and by the Science and Technology Project of Chengdu under Grant 2017-CY02-00030-GX.
Funding
This study was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 61432012 and U1435213 and by the Science and Technology Project of Chengdu under Grant 2017-CY02-00030-GX.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interests
The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Ethical approval
This article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors.
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
This article is part of the Topical Collection on Systems-Level Quality Improvement
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Chen, S., Guo, J., Wang, C. et al. DeepLNAnno: a Web-Based Lung Nodules Annotating System for CT Images. J Med Syst 43, 197 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-019-1258-9
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-019-1258-9