The computer aided diagnosis (CAD) problems of detecting
potentially diseased structures from medical images are
typically distinguished by the following challenging characteristics:
extremely unbalanced data between negative
and positive classes; stringent real-time requirement of online
execution; multiple positive candidates generated for
the same malignant structure that are highly correlated and
spatially close to each other. To address all these problems,
we propose a novel learning formulation to combine cascade
classification and multiple instance learning (MIL) in
a unified min-max framework, leading to a joint optimization
problem which can be converted to a tractable quadratically
constrained quadratic program and efficiently solved
by block-coordinate optimization algorithms.
We apply the proposed approach to the CAD problems of
detecting pulmonary embolism and colon cancer from computed
tomography images. Experimental results show that
our approach signifi...