Deformable Dilated Faster R-CNN for Universal Lesion Detection in CT Images

Cancer is a major public health issue and takes the second-highest toll of deaths caused by non-communicable diseases worldwide. Automatically detecting lesions at an early stage is essential to increase the chance of a cure. This study proposes a novel dilated Faster R-CNN with modulated deformable convolution and modulated deformable positive-sensitive region of interest pooling to detect lesions in computer tomography images. A pre-trained VGG-16 is transferred as the backbone of Faster R-CNN, followed by a region proposal network and a region of interest pooling layer to achieve lesion detection. The modulated deformable convolutional layers are employed to learn deformable convolutional filters, while the modulated deformable positive-sensitive region of interest pooling provides an enhanced feature extraction on the feature maps. Moreover, dilated convolutions are combined with the modulated deformable convolutions to fine-tune the VGG-16 model with multi-scale receptive fields. In the experiments evaluated on the DeepLesion dataset, the modulated deformable positive-sensitive region of interest pooling model achieves the highest sensitivity score of 58.8% on average with dilation of [4, 4, 4] and outperforms state-of-the-art models in the range of [2, 8] average false positives per image. This research demonstrates the suitability of dilation modifications and the possibility of enhancing the performance using a modulated deformable positive-sensitive region of interest pooling layer for universal lesion detectors.