Towards radiologist-level cancer risk assessment in CT lung screening using deep learning.

Purpose: Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer mortality in the US, responsible for more deaths than breast, prostate, colon and pancreas cancer combined and large population studies have indicated that low-dose computed tomography (CT) screening of the chest can significantly reduce this death rate. Recently, the usefulness of Deep Learning (DL) models for lung cancer risk assessment has been demonstrated. However, in many cases model performances are evaluated on small/medium size test sets, thus not providing strong model generalization and stability guarantees which are necessary for clinical adoption.