Appearance-based diagnostic system for early assessment of malignant lung nodules

A novel 2D approach for early assessment of malignant lung nodules based on analyzing the spatial distribution of Hounsfield values for the detected lung nodules is proposed. Spatial distribution of Hounsfield values comprising the malignant nodule appearance is accurately modeled with a new 2D rotationally invariant second-order Markov-Gibbs Random Field (MGRF). Preliminary experiments on 109 lung nodules (51 malignant and 58 benign) show that the proposed method is a promising supplement to current technologies (biopsy-based diagnostic systems) for the early diagnosis of lung cancer.