Title
Automatic segmentation and identification of solitary pulmonary nodules on follow-up CT scans based on local intensity structure analysis and non-rigid image registration
Abstract
This paper presents a novel method that can automatically segment solitary pulmonary nodule (SPN) and match such segmented SPNs on follow-up thoracic CT scans. Due to the clinical importance, a physician needs to find SPNs on chest CT and observe its progress over time in order to diagnose whether it is benign or malignant, or to observe the effect of chemotherapy for malignant ones using follow-up data. However, the enormous amount of CT images makes large burden tasks to a physician. In order to lighten this burden, we developed a method for automatic segmentation and assisting observation of SPNs in follow-up CT scans. The SPNs on input 3D thoracic CT scan are segmented based on local intensity structure analysis and the information of pulmonary blood vessels. To compensate lung deformation, we co-register follow-up CT scans based on an affine and a non-rigid registration. Finally, the matches of detected nodules are found from registered CT scans based on a similarity measurement calculation. We applied these methods to three patients including 14 thoracic CT scans. Our segmentation method detected 96.7% of SPNs from the whole images, and the nodule matching method found 83.3% correspondences from segmented SPNs. The results also show our matching method is robust to the growth of SPN, including integration/separation and appearance/disappearance. These confirmed our method is feasible for segmenting and identifying SPNs on follow-up CT scans.
Year
DOI
Venue
2011
10.1117/12.878731
Proceedings of SPIE
Keywords
Field
DocType
computer-aided diagnosis,solitary pulmonary nodule,segmentation,matching
Affine transformation,Structure analysis,Computer vision,Solitary pulmonary nodule,Segmentation,Computer-aided diagnosis,Computed tomography,Artificial intelligence,Image registration,Physics
Conference
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
7963
0277-786X
2
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.43
0
10
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Bin Chen1161.63
hideto naito220.43
Yoshihiko Nakamura37012.29
Takayuki Kitasaka452067.91
Daniel Rueckert59338637.58
Hirotoshi Honma6309.77
Hirotsugu Takabatake723529.60
Masaki Mori814417.48
Hiroshi Natori922028.49
Kensaku Mori101125160.28