Evaluation of geometric feature descriptors for detection and classification of lung nodules in low dose CT scans of the chest

This paper examines the effectiveness of geometric feature descriptors, common in computer vision, for false positive reduction and for classification of lung nodules in low dose CT (LDCT) scans. A data-driven lung nodule modeling approach creates templates for common nodule types, using active appearance models (AAM); which are then used to detect candidate nodules based on optimum similarity measured by the normalized cross-correlation (NCC). Geometric feature descriptors (e.g., SIFT, LBP and SURF) are applied to the output of the detection step, in order to extract features from the nodule candidates, for further enhancement of output and possible reduction of false positives. Results on the clinical ELCAP database showed that the descriptors provide 2% enhancements in the specificity of the detected nodule above the NCC results when used in a k-NN classifier. Thus quantitative measures of enhancements of the performance of CAD models based on LDCT are now possible and are entirely model-based. Most importantly, our approach is applicable for classification of nodules into categories and pathologies.