Automated Detection of Pulmonary Nodules in HRCT Images

Lung cancer´s death rates have been the main cause of cancer deaths in the world, early detection and treatment of lung cancer can greatly improve the survival rate of patient. This paper presents an automatic computer-aided detection (CAD) scheme that can identify the pulmonary nodule at an early stage from CT images. The work is separated to several steps: the segmentation of lung parenchyma, trachea and main airway bronchi elimination, the filter of nodule candidates, the detection of nodule candidates, the feature extraction and classification, three-dimensional visualization. The clinical testing for lots of lung cancer patients revealed that its high detection sensitivity of pulmonary nodules can meet basically the requirement of clinical diagnosis.