Detection and follow-up assessment of pleural thickenings from 3D CT data

Pleural thickenings as biomarker of exposure to asbestos may evolve into malignant pleural mesothelioma. The diagnosis is based on a visual investigation of CT images, which is a time consuming and subjective procedure. Our image processing system segments the lung areas, and identifies the pleural contours using thresholding and contour relaxation. A convexity model is then used together with a Hounsfield unit threshold to detect pleural thickenings. The assessment of the detected pleural thickenings is based on a spline-based model of the healthy pleura. Follow-up study between two consecutive data, carried out by normalizing the coordinate system, leads to a diagnosis supporting tool to detect pleural mesothelioma in its early stage.