METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR AUTOMATICALLY DETECTING LUNG NODULES FROM MULTI-SLICE HIGH RESOLUTION COMPUTED TOMOGRAPHY (MSHR CT) IMAGES

摘要

A method for automatically detecting lung nodules from MSHR CT images includes defining a volume of interest (VOI) for a lung volume in an MSHR CT image (314). The lung volume is examined using the VOI (316), including, determining a local histogram of intensity (316a) and adaptive threshold values for segmenting the VOI to obtain seeds (316d). Each seed is examined to detect lung nodules therefrom (318), including segmenting anatomical structures represented by the seed by applying a segmentation method that adaptively adjusts a segmentation threshold value based on histogram analysis of the seed to extract the structures based on three-dimensional connectivity and histogram intensity information (318a), and classifying each structure as a lung nodule or a non-nodule based on a priori knowledge corresponding to lung nodules and related structures (320). The lung nodules are displayed (326). The lung nodules are analyzed (328), including automatically quantifying lung nodule features to provide an automatic detection decision (328a).