  Enlarged lymph nodes (LNs) can provide important information for cancer
diagnosis, staging, and measuring treatment reactions, making automated
detection a highly sought goal. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm
representation of decomposing the LN detection problem into a set of 2D object
detection subtasks on sampled CT slices, largely alleviating the curse of
dimensionality issue. Our 2D detection can be effectively formulated as linear
classification on a single image feature type of Histogram of Oriented
Gradients (HOG), covering a moderate field-of-view of 45 by 45 voxels. We
exploit both simple pooling and sparse linear fusion schemes to aggregate these
2D detection scores for the final 3D LN detection. In this manner, detection is
more tractable and does not need to perform perfectly at instance level (as
weak hypotheses) since our aggregation process will robustly harness collective
information for LN detection. Two datasets (90 patients with 389 mediastinal
LNs and 86 patients with 595 abdominal LNs) are used for validation.
Cross-validation demonstrates 78.0% sensitivity at 6 false positives/volume
(FP/vol.) (86.1% at 10 FP/vol.) and 73.1% sensitivity at 6 FP/vol. (87.2% at 10
FP/vol.), for the mediastinal and abdominal datasets respectively. Our results
compare favorably to previous state-of-the-art methods.
