Lung segmentation and tumor detection from CT thorax volumes of FDG PET-CT scans by template registration and incorporation of functional information

Automatic segmentation and detection of lungs and tumors in FDG PET-CT images is potentially beneficial in the diagnosis and staging of patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). However, simultaneous lung segmentation and tumor detection is not a trivial task, particularly due to noise in the datasets, proximity of the lung lesion to the mediastinum and chest wall in certain instances, and disease involvement of non-enlarged lymph nodes.