Research on Performance Metrics and Augmentation Methods in Lung Nodule Classification

Abstract

Lung nodule classification is crucial for the diagnosis and treatment of lung diseases. However, selecting appropriate metrics to evaluate classifier performance is challenging, due to the prevalence of negative samples over positive ones, resulting in imbalanced datasets. This imbalance often necessitates the augmentation of positive samples to train powerful models effectively. Furthermore, specific medical tasks require tailored augmentation methods, the effectiveness of which merits further exploration based on task objectives. This study conducted a detailed analysis of commonly used metrics in lung nodule detection, examining their characteristics and selecting suitable metrics based on this analysis and our experimental findings. The selected metrics were then applied to assessing different combinations of image augmentation techniques for nodule classification. Ultimately, the most effective metric was identified, leading to the determination of the most advantageous augmentation method combinations.