# A Cascaded Approach for ultraly High Performance Lesion Detection and False Positive Removal in Liver CT Scans

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.16036 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16036/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Jun 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [3D U-Net: Learning Dense Volumetric Segmentation from Sparse Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06650/) (2016)
- [The Medical Segmentation Decathlon](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05735/) (2021)
- [The Liver Tumor Segmentation Benchmark (LiTS)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.04056/) (2019)
- [A large annotated medical image dataset for the development and evaluation of segmentation algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09063/) (2019)
- [A Survey on Deep Semi-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00550/) (2021)
- [AbdomenCT-1K: Is Abdominal Organ Segmentation A Solved Problem?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.14808/) (2020)
- [Synthetic Data Augmentation using GAN for Improved Liver Lesion Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.02385/) (2018)
- [Automatic Liver and Lesion Segmentation in CT Using Cascaded Fully Convolutional Neural Networks and 3D Conditional Random Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02177/) (2016)
- [Learning from Multiple Datasets with Heterogeneous and Partial Labels for Universal Lesion Detection in CT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.02577/) (2020)
- [RA-UNet: A hybrid deep attention-aware network to extract liver and tumor in CT scans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.01328/) (2018)
- [A 3D Probabilistic Deep Learning System for Detection and Diagnosis of Lung Cancer Using Low-Dose CT Scans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.03233/) (2019)
- [Automatic Liver Lesion Segmentation Using A Deep Convolutional Neural Network Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.07239/) (2017)
- [Harvesting, Detecting, and Characterizing Liver Lesions from Large-scale Multi-phase CT Data via Deep Dynamic Texture Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.15691/) (2020)
- [Detection-aided liver lesion segmentation using deep learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11069/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Liver Tumor Screening and Diagnosis in CT with Pixel-Lesion-Patient Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08268/) (2023)
- [Cluster-Induced Mask Transformers for Effective Opportunistic Gastric Cancer Screening on Non-contrast CT Scans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04525/) (2023)
- [Parse and Recall: Towards Accurate Lung Nodule Malignancy Prediction like Radiologists](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10824/) (2023)
- [Cross-Phase Mutual Learning Framework for Pulmonary Embolism Identification on Non-Contrast CT Scans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11529/) (2024)
- [PLUS: Plug-and-Play Enhanced Liver Lesion Diagnosis Model on Non-Contrast CT Scans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.03872/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Liver cancer has high morbidity and mortality rates in the world. Multi-phase CT is a main medical imaging modality for detecting/identifying and diagnosing liver tumors. Automatically detecting and classifying liver lesions in CT images have the potential to improve the clinical workflow. This task remains challenging due to liver lesions' large variations in size, appearance, image contrast, and the complexities of tumor types or subtypes. In this work, we customize a multi-object labeling tool for multi-phase CT images, which is used to curate a large-scale dataset containing 1,631 patients with four-phase CT images, multi-organ masks, and multi-lesion (six major types of liver lesions confirmed by pathology) masks. We develop a two-stage liver lesion detection pipeline, where the high-sensitivity detecting algorithms in the first stage discover as many lesion proposals as possible, and the lesion-reclassification algorithms in the second stage remove as many false alarms as possible. The multi-sensitivity lesion detection algorithm maximizes the information utilization of the individual probability maps of segmentation, and the lesion-shuffle augmentation effectively explores the texture contrast between lesions and the liver. Independently tested on 331 patient cases, the proposed model achieves high sensitivity and specificity for malignancy classification in the multi-phase contrast-enhanced CT (99.2%, 97.1%, diagnosis setting) and in the noncontrast CT (97.3%, 95.7%, screening setting).