Automated detection of lung cancer using statistical and morphological image processing techniques

Abstract

Lung cancer represents the second most commonly diagnosed cancer among Jordanian population. Evidence that early detection of lung cancer may allow for more timely therapeutic intervention has provided the momentum for lung cancer screening programs around the world. In this study, a computer aided detection (CAD) system is proposed in an attempt to detect the lung cancer areas using computed tomography (CT) images. It is implemented as a “second reader” to help radiologists focus their attention on regions that might be missed during visual interpretation. The proposed CAD system has three main stages; Segmentation by thresholding the CT images, labeling the founded regions and then extracting some diagnostic features of each region for further analysis and interpretation. The study is trained, tested, and validated using images obtained from forty five patients. The obtained results perfectly match the radiologist's diagnosis in detecting the defected areas and quantitatively measuring its size, location, borders as well as displaying its other diagnostic characteristics. Moreover, the proposed system can detect misclassified regions.