Validation, comparison, and combination of algorithms for automatic detection of pulmonary nodules in computed tomography images: The LUNA16 challenge

•A novel objective evaluation framework for nodule detection algorithms using the largest publicly available LIDC-IDRI data set.•The impact of combining individual systems on the detection performance was investigated.•The combination of classical candidate detectors and a combination of deep learning architectures generates excellent results, better than any individual system.•Our observer study has shown that CAD detects nodules that were missed by expert readers.•We released this set of additional nodules for further development of CAD systems.