Pulmonary nodule diagnosis using dual‐modal supervised autoencoder based on extreme learning machine

In recent years, deep learning techniques have been applied to the diagnosis of pulmonary nodules. In order to improve the pulmonary nodule diagnostic performance effectively, we propose a novel pulmonary nodule diagnosis method using dual‐modal deep supervised autoencoder based on extreme learning machine for which discriminative features are automatically learnt from the input data. The network is fed with nodule images in pairs obtained from computed tomography and positron emission tomography respectively. For each pair image, the high‐level discriminative features of nodules in computed tomography and positron emission tomography are extracted from stacked supervised autoencoder layers. The outputs of the proposed architecture are combined using an ideal fusion method to get the final classification. In the experiments, 5‐fold cross‐validation method is used to validate the proposed method on 1,600 pulmonary nodule images and our method reaches high‐classification sensitivities of 91.75% at 1.58 false positives per scan. Meanwhile, compared with other deep learning diagnosis methods, our method achieves better discriminative results and is highly suited to be used for pulmonary nodule diagnosis.