Context Curves for Classification of Lung Nodule Images

In this paper, a feature-based imaging classification method is presented to classify the lung nodules in low dose computed tomography (LDCT) slides into four categories: well-circumscribed, vascularized, juxta-pleural and pleural-tail. The proposed method focuses on the feature design, which describes both lung nodule and surrounding context information, and contains two main stages: (1) superpixel labeling, which labels the pixels into foreground and background based on an image patch division approach, (2) context curve calculation, which transfers the superpixel labeling result into feature vector. While the first stage preprocesses the image, extracting the major context anatomical structures for each type of nodules, the context curve provides a discriminative description for intra- and inter-type nodules. The evaluation is conducted on a publicly available dataset and the results indicate the promising performance of the proposed method on lung nodule classification.