Lung cancer is the cancer type with highest mortality rate worldwide. It has been shown that early detection with computer tomography (CT) scans can reduce deaths caused by this disease. Manual detection of cancer nodules is costly and time-consuming. We present a general framework for the detection of nodules in lung CT images. Our method consists of the pre-processing of a patient’s CT with filtering and lung extraction from the entire volume using a previously calculated mask for each patient. From the extracted lungs, we perform a candidate generation stage using morphological operations, followed by the training of a three-dimensional convolutional neural network for feature representation and classification of extracted candidates for false positive reduction. We perform experiments on the publicly available LIDC-IDRI dataset. Our candidate extraction approach is effective to produce precise candidates with a recall of 99.6%. In addition, false positive reduction stage manages to successfully classify candidates and increases precision by a factor of 7.000.