On Combining Computer-Aided Detection Systems

Computer-aided detection (CAD) is increasingly used in clinical practice and for many applications a multitude of CAD systems have been developed. In practice, CAD systems have different strengths and weaknesses and it is therefore interesting to consider their combination. In this paper, we present generic methods to combine multiple CAD systems and investigate what kind of performance increase can be expected. Experimental results are presented using data from the ANODE09 and ROC09 online CAD challenges for the detection of pulmonary nodules in computed tomography scans and red lesions in retinal images, respectively. For both applications, combination results in a large and significant increase in performance when compared to the best individual CAD system.