Lung Nodule Detection

Abstract

The quantity of digital medical images that must be reviewed by radiologists as part of routine clinical practice has greatly increased in recent years. New acquisition devices generate images that have higher spatial resolution, both in 2-D as well as 3-D, requiring physicians to use more sophisticated visualization tools. In addition, advanced visualization systems, designed to assist the radiologist, are now part of a standard arsenal of tools which, together with workflow improvements, aid the physicians in their clinical tasks. Computer-Assisted Diagnosis (CAD) systems are one of such class of sophisticated tools to support the radiologists in tedious and time-consuming tasks such as the detection of lesions. Over the past ten years, CAD systems have evolved to reach sensitivity capabilities equivalent to or exceeding that of a radiologist, thus becoming clinically acceptable, but with limited specificity which necessitates their use as a second reader tool. This chapter presents one such system (LungCAD(1)) designed for the detection of nodules in the lung parenchyma. Its performance was evaluated as part of a detection challenge organized by ImageCLEF 2009.