Automatic detection of GGO regions on CT images in LIDC dataset based on statistical features

Detection of pulmonary nodules with ground glass opacity (GGO) is a difficult task in radiology. Follow up is often required in medical fields. But diagnosis based on CT images are dependent on ability and experience of radiologists. In addition to that, enormous number of images increase their burden. So, to improve the detection accuracy and to reduce the burden of doctors, a CAD (Computer Aided Diagnosis) system is expected. So, in this paper, we propose an automatic algorithm for GGO detection on CT images. At first, vessel areas are removed from original CT images by using 3D Line Filter and then candidate regions are detected by threshold processing. After that, we calculate statistical features of segmented candidate regions and use artificial neural network (ANN) to distinguish final candidate regions. We applied the proposed method to 31 CT image sets in the Lung Image Database Consortium (LIDC) which is supplied by National Center Institute (NCI). In this paper, we show the experimental results and give discussions.