Title :
Semi-automated measurement of pulmonary nodule growth without explicit segmentation
Author :
Jirapatnakul, A.C. ; Reeves, A.P. ; Biancardi, A.M. ; Yankelevitz, D.F. ; Henschke, C.I.
Author_Institution :
Sch. of Electr. & Comput. Eng., Cornell Univ., Ithaca, NY, USA
fDate :
June 28 2009-July 1 2009
Abstract :
Many nodule measurement methods rely on accurate segmentation of the nodule and may fail with complex nodule morphologies; often slight variations in segmentation result in large volume differences. A method, growth analysis from density (GAD), is presented that measures nodule growth without explicit segmentation through the application of a Gaussian weighting function to a region around the nodule, avoiding the drawbacks of segmentation-based methods. The resulting mean density is used as a surrogate for volume when computing growth. A zero-change nodule dataset was used to establish the variability of the method, followed by testing on datasets of stable, malignant, and complex nodules. There was no significant difference in percent volume change between the methods (p=0.55), and while GAD showed similar measurement variability and discriminative performance as a segmentation-based method (GAS), it was able to successfully measure growth on complex nodules where GAS failed.
Keywords :
computerised tomography; image segmentation; lung; medical image processing; tumours; Gaussian weighting function; computerised tomography; explicit segmentation; growth analysis from density; malignant nodules; pulmonary nodule growth; semi-automated measurement; stable nodules; zero-change nodule dataset; Biomedical engineering; Biomedical imaging; Cancer; Computed tomography; Density measurement; Educational institutions; Electric variables measurement; Image segmentation; Medical diagnostic imaging; Volume measurement; X-ray tomography; density change; lung cancer; pulmonary nodule growth;
Conference_Titel :
Biomedical Imaging: From Nano to Macro, 2009. ISBI '09. IEEE International Symposium on
Conference_Location :
Boston, MA
Print_ISBN :
978-1-4244-3931-7
Electronic_ISBN :
1945-7928
DOI :
10.1109/ISBI.2009.5193187