Multi-Modal Feature Fusion-Based Multi-Branch Classification Network for Pulmonary Nodule Malignancy Suspiciousness Diagnosis

Detecting and identifying malignant nodules on chest computed tomography (CT) plays an important role in the early diagnosis and timely treatment of lung cancer, which can greatly reduce the number of deaths worldwide. In view of the existing methods in pulmonary nodule diagnosis, the importance of clinical radiological structured data (laboratory examination, radiological data) is ignored for the accuracy judgment of patients' condition. Hence, a multi-modal fusion multi-branch classification network is constructed to detect and classify pulmonary nodules in this work: (1) Radiological data of pulmonary nodules are used to construct structured features of length 9. (2) A multi-branch fusion-based effective attention mechanism network is designed for 3D CT Patch unstructured data, which uses 3D ECA-ResNet to dynamically adjust the extracted features. In addition, feature maps with different receptive fields from multi-layer are fully fused to obtain representative multi-scale unstructured features. (3) Multi-modal feature fusion of structured data and unstructured data is performed to distinguish benign and malignant nodules. Numerous experimental results show that this advanced network can effectively classify the benign and malignant pulmonary nodules for clinical diagnosis, which achieves the highest accuracy (94.89%), sensitivity (94.91%), and F1-score (94.65%) and lowest false positive rate (5.55%).