Learning from only positive and unlabeled data to detect lesions in vascular CT images

Detecting vascular lesions is an important task in the diagnosis and follow-up of the coronary heart disease. While most existing solutions tackle calcified and non-calcified plaques separately, we present a new algorithm capable of detecting both types of lesions in CT images. It builds up on a semi-supervised classification framework, in which the training set is made of both unlabeled data and a small amount of data labeled as normal. Our method takes advantage of the arrival of newly acquired data to re-train the classifier and improve its performance. We present results on synthetic data and on datasets from 15 patients. With a small amount of labeled training data our method achieved a 89.8% true positive rate, which is comparable to state-of-the-art supervised methods, and the performance can improve after additional iterations.