A deep learning based CT image analytics protocol to identify lung adenocarcinoma category and high-risk tumor area.

We present a protocol which implements deep learning-based identification of the lung adenocarcinoma category with high accuracy and generalizability, and labeling of the high-risk area on Computed Tomography (CT) images. The protocol details the execution of the python project based on the dataset used in the original publication or a custom dataset. Detailed steps include data standardization, data preprocessing, model implementation, results display through heatmaps, and statistical analysis process with Origin software or python codes. For complete details on the use and execution of this protocol, please refer to Chen et al. (2022).

Machine vision-assisted identification of the lung adenocarcinoma category and high-risk tumor area based on CT images.

Computed tomography (CT) is a widely used medical imaging technique. It is important to determine the relationship between CT images and pathological examination results of lung adenocarcinoma to better support its diagnosis. In this study, a bilateral-branch network with a knowledge distillation procedure (KDBBN) was developed for the auxiliary diagnosis of lung adenocarcinoma. KDBBN can automatically identify adenocarcinoma categories and detect the lesion area that most likely contributes to the identification of specific types of adenocarcinoma based on lung CT images. In addition, a knowledge distillation process was established for the proposed framework to ensure that the developed models can be applied to different datasets. The results of our comprehensive computational study confirmed that our method provides a reliable basis for adenocarcinoma diagnosis supplementary to the pathological examination. Meanwhile, the high-risk area labeled by KDBBN highly coincides with the related lesion area labeled by doctors in clinical diagnosis.