PanelNet: A Novel Deep Neural Network for Predicting Collective Diagnostic Ratings by a Panel of Radiologists for Pulmonary Nodules

Reducing misdiagnosis rate is a central concern in modern medicine. In clinical practice, group-based collective diagnosis is frequently exercised to curb the misdiagnosis rate. However, little effort has been dedicated to emulating the collective intelligence behind the group-based decision making practice in computer-aided diagnosis research to this day. To fill the overlooked gap, this study introduces a novel deep neural network, titled PanelNet, that is able to computationally model and reproduce the aforesaid collective diagnosis capability demonstrated by a group of medical experts. To experimentally explore the validity of the new solution, we apply the proposed PanelNet to one of the key tasks in radiology---assessing malignant ratings of pulmonary nodules. For each nodule and a given panel, PanelNet is able to predict statistical distribution of malignant ratings collectively judged by the panel of radiologists. Extensive experimental results consistently demonstrate PanelNet outperforms multiple state-of-the-art computer-aided diagnosis methods applicable to the collective diagnostic task. To our best knowledge, no other collective computer-aided diagnosis method grounded on modern machine learning technologies has been previously proposed. By its design, PanelNet can also be easily applied to model collective diagnosis processes employed for other diseases.