S4ND: Single-Shot Single-Scale Lung Nodule Detection

The most recent lung nodule detection studies rely on computationally expensive multi-stage frameworks to detect nodules from CT scans. To address this computational challenge and provide better performance, in this paper we propose S4ND, a new deep learning based method for lung nodule detection. Our approach uses a single feed forward pass of a single network for detection. The whole detection pipeline is designed as a single 3D Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with dense connections, trained in an end-to-end manner. S4ND does not require any further post-processing or user guidance to refine detection results. Experimentally, we compared our network with the current state-of-the-art object detection network (SSD) in computer vision as well as the state-of-the-art published method for lung nodule detection (3D DCNN). We used publicly available 888 CT scans from LUNA challenge dataset and showed that the proposed method outperforms the current literature both in terms of efficiency and accuracy by achieving an average FROC-score of 0.897. We also provide an in-depth analysis of our proposed network to shed light on the unclear paradigms of tiny object detection.