A CAD system for the early detection of lung nodules using computed tomography scan images

Abstract

In this paper, a computer-aided detection system is developed to detect lung nodules at an early stage using Computed Tomography (CT) scan images where lung nodules are one of the most important indicators to predict lung cancer. The developed system consists of four stages. First, the raw Computed Tomography lung images were pre-processed to enhance the image contrast and eliminate noise. Second, an automatic segmentation procedure for human's lung and pulmonary nodule candidates (nodules, blood vessels) using a two-level thresholding technique and morphological operations. Third, a feature fusion technique that fuses four feature extraction techniques: the statistical features of first and second order, value histogram features, histogram of oriented gradients features, and texture features of gray level co-occurrence matrix based on wavelet coefficients was utilised to extract the main features. The fourth stage is the classifier. Three classifiers were used and their performance was compared in order to obtain the highest classification accuracy. These are; multi-layer feedforward neural network, radial basis function neural network and support vector machine. The performance of the proposed system was assessed using three quantitative parameters. These are: the classification accuracy rate, the sensitivity and the specificity. Forty standard computed tomography images containing 320 regions of interest obtained from an early lung cancer action project association were used to test and evaluate the developed system. The images consists of 40 computed tomography scan images. The results have shown that the fused features vector resulting from genetic algorithm as a feature selection technique and the support vector machine classifier give the highest classification accuracy rate, sensitivity and specificity values of 99.6%, 100% and 99.2%, respectively.