Quantitative evaluation of pneumoconiosis in chest radiographs obtained with a CCD scanner

This paper presents a computer-aided diagnosis for pneumoconiosis radiographs obtained with a common CCD scanner. Since the existing diagnosis systems for pneumoconiosis extract abnormalities of pneumoconiosis from images obtained with a special scanner which can appropriately apply for chest radiographs, it is difficult to apply the methods to images obtained with a CCD scanner due to unclear shadow and the systems are not practical for medical doctors due to high costs. In the unclear images, the abnormal levels of pneumoconiosis could depend on density distributions in each of intercostal and rib areas. Therefore, the proposed method measures the abnormalities by extracting characteristics of the distribution in the areas. Besides, the proposed method classifies the images into the three categories of pneumoconiosis. Experimental results of the classifications for 51 right-lung images including 6 pneumoconiosis images have shown that the proposed abnormalities are well extracted according to the standards of pneumoconiosis categories.