Multi-scale detection of pulmonary nodules by integrating attention mechanism

The detection of pulmonary nodules has a low accuracy due to the various shapes and sizes of pulmonary nodules. In this paper, a multi-scale detection network for pulmonary nodules based on the attention mechanism is proposed to accurately predict pulmonary nodules. During data processing, the pseudo-color processing strategy is designed to enhance the gray image and introduce more contextual semantic information. In the feature extraction network section, this paper designs a basic module of ResSCBlock integrating attention mechanism for feature extraction. At the same time, the feature pyramid structure is used for feature fusion in the network, and the problem of the detection of small-size nodules which are easily lost is solved by multi-scale prediction method. The proposed method is tested on the LUNA16 data set, with an 83% mAP value. Compared with other detection networks, the proposed method achieves an improvement in detecting pulmonary nodules.