Automatic Detection of Pulmonary Nodules in Multi-slice CT Based on 3D Neural Networks with Adaptive Initial Weights

Detection of pulmonary nodules combined of extraction by multi-directions PCA and identification by 3D (three dimension) BP neural network is presented in the paper, which is different from most lung CAD algorithms, that it does not require any a priori information by human intervention but solely the information contained by the CT image itself, and it is capable to perform full automation which support the radiologists in their final decision. The technique is tested against 60 cases of different pulmonary nodules which are screened out by cancer experts. Results confirm the validity of technique as well as enhanced performance.