Screening of Radiological Images Suspected of Containing Lung Nodules

This paper presents a study about screening large radiological image streams produced in hospitals for earlier detection of lung nodules. Being one of the most difficult classification tasks in the literature, our objective is to measure how well state-of-the-art classifiers can screen out the images stream to keep as many positive cases as possible in an output stream to be inspected by clinicians. We performed several experiments with different image resolutions and training datasets from different sources, always taking ResNet-152 as the base neural network. Results over existing datasets show that, contrary to other diseases like pneumonia, detecting nodules is a hard task when using only radiographies. Indeed, final diagnosis by clinicians is usually performed with much more precise images like computed tomographies.