Classification of lung nodules on temporal subtraction image based on statistical features and improvement of segmentation accuracy

Recently, thorax MDCT images are used in visual screening for early detection of lung nodules. Radiologists can easily detect lung nodules on images, but it has enormous images and load of radiologist for visual screening. To reduce the load of radiologist and improve the detection accuracy, a CAD (Computer Aided Diagnosis) system is expected from medical fields. In the medical image processing fields, some related works are reported to develop the CAD system including temporal subtraction technique as helpful technical issues. In this paper, we propose a classification of lung nodules on temporal subtraction image based on image processing technique. At first, the candidate regions including nodules are detected by the multiple threshold technique in terms of the pixel value on the temporal subtraction images. Then, we remove vessel regions on nodules by the most suitable threshold technique and watershed method. Also we remove the false positives which are caused by mis-registration using selective enhancement filter, rule-base method and artificial neural networks. In this paper, we illustrate some experimental result which applied our algorithm to 31 chest MDCT cases including lung nodules.