MTANNs yielded higher performance than CNNs for nodule detection and classification. Deep CNN architectures achieved higher performance than shallow architectures for nodule detection. CNN architectures with varying depths performed comparably for nodule classification. MTANNs can achieve desired performance with a smaller training dataset than do the CNNs. MTANNs tend to learn the appearance of lesion parts, whereas CNNs attempt to learn the lesion appearance as a whole.