Fast and Adaptive Detection of Pulmonary Nodules in Thoracic CT Images Using a Hierarchical Vector Quantization Scheme

摘要

Computer-aided detection (CADe) of pulmonary nodules is critical to assisting radiologists in early identification of lung cancer from computed tomography (CT) scans. This paper proposes a novel CADe system based on a hierarchical vector quantization (VQ) scheme. Compared with the commonly-used simple thresholding approach, high-level VQ yields a more accurate segmentation of the lungs from the chest volume. In identifying initial nodule candidates (INCs) within the lungs, low-level VQ proves to be effective for INCs detection and segmentation, as well as computationally efficient compared to existing approaches. False-positive (FP) reduction is conducted via rule-based filtering operations in combination with a feature-based support vector machine classifier. The proposed system was validated on 205 patient cases from the publically available on-line LIDC (Lung Image Database Consortium) database, with each case having at least one juxta-pleural nodule annotation. Experimental results demonstrated that our CADe system obtained an overall sensitivity of 82.7% at a specificity of 4 FPs/scan, and 89.2% sensitivity at 4.14 FPs/scan for the classification of juxta-pleural INCs only. With respect to comparable CADe systems, the proposed system shows outperformance and demonstrates its potential for fast and adaptive detection of pulmonary nodules via CT imaging.