Comparing and combining algorithms for computer-aided detection of pulmonary nodules in computed tomography scans: The ANODE09 study.

Numerous publications and commercial systems are available that deal with automatic detection of pulmonary nodules in thoracic computed tomography scans, but a comparative study where many systems are applied to the same data set has not yet been performed. This paper introduces ANODE09 ( http://anode09.isi.uu.nl), a database of 55 scans from a lung cancer screening program and a web-based framework for objective evaluation of nodule detection algorithms. Any team can upload results to facilitate benchmarking. The performance of six algorithms for which results are available are compared; five from academic groups and one commercially available system. A method to combine the output of multiple systems is proposed. Results show a substantial performance difference between algorithms, and demonstrate that combining the output of algorithms leads to marked performance improvements.