Early diagnosis of pulmonary nodules (PNs) can improve the survival rate of patients and yet is a challenging task for radiologists due to the image noise and artifacts in computed tomography (CT) images. In this paper, we propose a novel and effective abnormality detector implementing the attention mechanism and group convolution on 3D single-shot detector (SSD) called group-attention SSD (GA-SSD). We find that group convolution is effective in extracting rich context information between continuous slices, and attention network can learn the target features automatically. We collected a large-scale dataset that contained 4146 CT scans with annotations of varying types and sizes of PNs (even PNs smaller than 3mm were annotated). To the best of our knowledge, this dataset is the largest cohort with relatively complete annotations for PNs detection. Our experimental results show that the proposed group-attention SSD outperforms the classic SSD framework as well as the state-of-the-art 3DCNN, especially on some challenging lesion types.
 We propose a deep convolutional neural network architecture codenamed Inception that achieves the new state of the art for classification and detection in the ImageNet Large-Scale Visual Recognition Challenge 2014 (ILSVRC14). The main hallmark of this architecture is the improved utilization of the computing resources inside the network. By a carefully crafted design, we increased the depth and width of the network while keeping the computational budget constant. To optimize quality, the architectural decisions were based on the Hebbian principle and the intuition of multi-scale processing. One particular incarnation used in our submission for ILSVRC14 is called GoogLeNet, a 22 layers deep network, the quality of which is assessed in the context of classification and detection. We present a simple, highly modularized network architecture for image classification. Our network is constructed by repeating a building block that aggregates a set of transformations with the same topology. Our simple design results in a homogeneous, multi-branch architecture that has only a few hyper-parameters to set. This strategy exposes a new dimension, which we call cardinality (the size of the set of transformations), as an essential factor in addition to the dimensions of depth and width. On the ImageNet-1K dataset, we empirically show that even under the restricted condition of maintaining complexity, increasing cardinality is able to improve classification accuracy. Moreover, increasing cardinality is more effective than going deeper or wider when we increase the capacity. Our models, named ResNeXt, are the foundations of our entry to the ILSVRC 2016 classification task in which we secured 2nd place. We further investigate ResNeXt on an ImageNet-5K set and the COCO detection set, also showing better results than its ResNet counterpart. The code and models are publicly available online. Convolutional networks are at the core of most state of-the-art computer vision solutions for a wide variety of tasks. Since 2014 very deep convolutional networks started to become mainstream, yielding substantial gains in various benchmarks. Although increased model size and computational cost tend to translate to immediate quality gains for most tasks (as long as enough labeled data is provided for training), computational efficiency and low parameter count are still enabling factors for various use cases such as mobile vision and big-data scenarios. Here we are exploring ways to scale up networks in ways that aim at utilizing the added computation as efficiently as possible by suitably factorized convolutions and aggressive regularization. We benchmark our methods on the ILSVRC 2012 classification challenge validation set demonstrate substantial gains over the state of the art: 21:2 top-1 and 5:6 top-5 error for single frame evaluation using a network with a computational cost of 5 billion multiply-adds per inference and with using less than 25 million parameters. With an ensemble of 4 models and multi-crop evaluation, we report 3:5 top-5 error and 17:3 top-1 error on the validation set and 3:6 top-5 error on the official test set.