Probabilistic lung nodule classification with belief decision trees

In reading Computed Tomography (CT) scans with potentially malignant lung nodules, radiologists make use of high level information (semantic characteristics) in their analysis. Computer-Aided Diagnostic Characterization (CADc) systems can assist radiologists by offering a “second opinion” - predicting these semantic characteristics for lung nodules. In this work, we propose a way of predicting the distribution of radiologists´ opinions using a multiple-label classification algorithm based on belief decision trees using the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Lung Image Database Consortium (LIDC) dataset, which includes semantic annotations by up to four human radiologists for each one of the 914 nodules. Furthermore, we evaluate our multiple-label results using a novel distance-threshold curve technique - and, measuring the area under this curve, obtain 69% performance on the validation subset. We conclude that multiple-label classification algorithms are an appropriate method of representing the diagnoses of multiple radiologists on lung CT scans when ground truth is unavailable.