Estimation of locations of mediastinal lymph nodes in three dimensional chest X-ray CT images

摘要

This report describes a technique to estimate lymph nodes that exist in the mediastinal part in chest X-ray CT images. Medical doctor must check whether every lymph node is normal or not on CT images when diagnosing lung nodules, but normal lymph nodes are not depicted in a CT image. Therefore, it will be useful if the every lymph node region is extracted in accordance with the general rule and is indicated on CT images. There are many organs that have to be specified to segment lymph nodes in the mediastinal region. Some of these organs can not be extracted automatically. Therefore, we estimate their existing regions in the appropriate precision to classify the lymph nodes. As a result of applying proposed method to actual CT images, every lymph node in the mediastinal region has been classified satisfactorily.