An algorithm was developed to segment solid pulmonary nodules attached to the chest wall in computedtomography scans. The pleural surface was estimated and used to segment the nodule from thechest wall. To estimate the surface, a robust approach was used to identify points that lie on the pleuralsurface but not on the nodule. A 3D surface was estimated from the identified surface points. Thesegmentation performance of the algorithm was evaluated on a database of 150 solid juxtapleural pulmonarynodules. Segmented images were rated on a scale of 1 to 4 based on visual inspection, with 3 and4 considered acceptable. This algorithm offers a large improvement in the success rate of juxtapleuralnodule segmentation, successfully segmenting 98.0% of nodules compared to 81.3% for a previously publishedplane-fitting algorithm, which will provide for the development of more robust automated nodulemeasurement methods.
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