INTEGRATION OF MULTIPLE CLASSIFIERS FOR COMPUTERIZED DETECTION OF LUNG NODULES IN CT

The purpose of this study was to investigate the usefulness of various classifier combination methods for improving the performance of a computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system for pulmonary nodule detection in computed tomography (CT). We employed 85 CT scans with 110 nodules in the publicly available Lung Image Database Consortium (LIDC) dataset. We first applied our CAD scheme trained previously to the LIDC cases for identifying initial nodule candidates, and extracting 18 features for each nodule candidate. We used eight individual classifiers for false positives (FPs) reduction, including linear discriminant analysis (LDA), quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA), Naive Bayes, simple logistic, artificial neural network (ANN) and support vector machines (SVMs) with three different kernels. Five classifier combination methods were then employed to integrate the outputs of the eight individual classifiers for improving detection performance. The five combination methods included two supervised (a likelihood ratio (LR) method and a probability method based on the output scores of the eight individual classifiers) and three unsupervised ones (the sum, the product and the majority voting of the output scores from the eight individual classifiers). Leave-one-case-out approach was employed to train and test individual classifiers and supervised combination methods. At a sensitivity of 80%, the numbers of FPs per CT scan for the eight individual classifiers were 6.1 for LDA, 19.9 for QDA, 10.8 for Naive Bayes, 8.4 for simple logistic, 8.6 for ANN, 23.7 for SVM-dot, 17.0 for SVM-poly, and 23.4 for SVM-anova; the numbers of FPs per CT scan for the five combination methods were 3.3 for the majority voting method, 5.0 for the sum, 4.6 for the product, 65.7 for the LR and 3.9 for the probability method. Compared to the best individual classifier, the majority voting method reduced 45% of FPs at 80% sensitivity. The performance of our CAD can be improved by combining multiple classifiers. The majority voting method achieved higher performance levels than other combination methods and all individual classifiers.