Research on lung nodule detection in X-ray plain films based on improved YOLOv12 model

To improve automatic lung nodule detection in chest X-ray images, this study proposes an improved YOLOv12-based detection framework by integrating space-to-depth convolution (SPDConv), a dynamic upsampling module (DySample), and a lightweight feature aggregation module (VoVGSCSP). SPDConv enhances spatial information preservation during feature extraction, DySample replaces conventional upsampling to improve multi-scale feature fusion, and VoVGSCSP strengthens feature representation while reducing computational redundancy. The optimized YOLOv12-DSV model was trained and evaluated using a publicly available chest X-ray dataset with annotated lung nodules from the Roboflow platform, with performance assessed through five-fold cross-validation and external testing. Experimental results show that the proposed model achieved an mAP50 of 0.735 and an mAP50-95 of 0.426, outperforming the original YOLOv12 model (mAP50: 0.704; mAP50-95: 0.411). In addition, the proposed model reduced the number of parameters from 2.52 to 2.21 M, decreased FLOPs from 6.0 to 5.2 G, and increased inference speed from 97.6 to 107.8 FPS. These results indicate that the proposed YOLOv12-DSV model improves detection accuracy while reducing computational cost, achieving a more favorable balance between detection performance and model complexity for lung nodule localization in chest X-ray images.