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An artificial neural network for lesion detection on single-photon emission computed tomographic images
1Department of Radiology, Duke University Medical Center, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina 27710.
Rationale And Objectives:
An artificial neural network (ANN) has been developed to detect nonactive circular lesions on single-slice, single-photon emission computed tomographic (SPECT) images reconstructed using filtered back projection (FBP).
Methods:
The neural network is a single-layer perception which learns to identify features on the SPECT image using supervised training with a modified delta rule. The network was trained on a set of SPECT images containing clinically realistic levels of noise. The trained network was applied to a set of 120 images, and the detection performance was evaluated at several decision thresholds using receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis.
Results:
The trained neural network performed better than human observers for the same detection task with the same images as reflected by a significantly larger ROC curve area.
Conclusions:
ANN can be trained successfully to perform lesion detection on reconstructed SPECT images.