A parameterized logarithmic image processing method with Laplacian of Gaussian filtering for lung nodule enhancement in chest radiographs

Hessian-MRLoG: Hessian information and multi-scale reverse LoG filter for pulmonary nodule detection

Computer-aided detection (CADe) of pulmonary nodules is an effective approach for early detection of lung cancer. However, due to the low contrast of lung computed tomography (CT) images, the interference of blood vessels and classifications, CADe has the problems of low detection rate and high false-positive rate (FPR). To solve these problems, a novel method using Hessian information and multi-scale reverse Laplacian of Gaussian (LoG) (Hessian-MRLoG) is proposed and developed in this work. Also, since the intensity distribution of the LoG operator and the lung nodule in CT images are inconsistent, and their shapes are mismatched, a multi-scale reverse Laplacian of Gaussian (MRLoG) is constructed. In addition, in order to enhance the effectiveness of target detection, the second-order partial derivatives of MRLoG are partially adjusted by introducing an adjustment factor. On this basis, the Hessian-MRLoG model is developed, and a novel elliptic filter is designed. Ultimately, in this study, the method of Hessian-MRLoG filtering is proposed and developed for pulmonary nodule detection. To verify its effectiveness and accuracy, the proposed method was used to analyze the LUNA16 dataset. The experimental results revealed that the proposed method had an accuracy of 93.6% and produced 1.0 false positives per scan (FPs/scan), indicating that the proposed method can improve the detection rate and significantly reduce the FPR. Therefore, the proposed method has the potential for application in the detection, localization and labeling of other lesion areas.

Pipeline for Advanced Contrast Enhancement (PACE) of Chest X-ray in Evaluating COVID-19 Patients by Combining Bidimensional Empirical Mode Decomposition and Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE)

COVID-19 is a new pulmonary disease which is driving stress to the hospitals due to the large number of cases worldwide. Imaging of lungs can play a key role in the monitoring of health status. Non-contrast chest computed tomography (CT) has been used for this purpose, mainly in China, with significant success. However, this approach cannot be massively used, mainly for both high risk and cost, also in some countries, this tool is not extensively available. Alternatively, chest X-ray, although less sensitive than CT-scan, can provide important information about the evolution of pulmonary involvement during the disease; this aspect is very important to verify the response of a patient to treatments. Here, we show how to improve the sensitivity of chest X-ray via a nonlinear post-processing tool, named PACE (Pipeline for Advanced Contrast Enhancement), combining properly Fast and Adaptive Bidimensional Empirical Mode Decomposition (FABEMD) and Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE). The results show an enhancement of the image contrast as confirmed by three widely used metrics: (i) contrast improvement index, (ii) entropy, and (iii) measure of enhancement. This improvement gives rise to a detectability of more lung lesions as identified by two radiologists, who evaluated the images separately, and confirmed by CT-scans. The results show this method is a flexible and an effective approach for medical image enhancement and can be used as a post-processing tool for medical image understanding and analysis.

Enhancement of Chest Radiograph in Emergency Intensive Care Unit by Means of Reverse Anisotropic Diffusion-Based Unsharp Masking Model

In intensive care units (ICUs), supporting devices play an important role, and the placement of these devices must be accurate, such as catheters and tubes. Taking portable chest radiograph (CXRs) for patients in ICU is a standard procedure. However, non-optimized exposure settings and misaligned body positions usually mean that portable CXRs are not in acceptable working condition. The purpose of this study was to enhance ICU CXRs to assist radiologists in the positioning of endotracheal, feeding, and nasogastric tubes in ICU patients. The unsharp masking model (USM) was a classical image enhancement technique. Because of the isotropic diffusion filter applied in this model, USM enhanced the edge information and noise simultaneously. In this paper, we proposed a reverse anisotropic diffusion (RAD)-based USM technique for enhancement of line structures in ICU CXRs. First, a RAD algorithm was applied to replace the Gaussian filter in the classical USM. The RAD algorithm only produced a smoothed image, in which edge information was smoothed while the noise was preserved. Then, the smoothed image was subtracted from the original image to produce the unsharp mask whereby only the edges were retained. Consequently, only edge information was enhanced in the final enhanced image by using the RAD-based USM model. The proposed method was tested for 87 ICU CXRs and the findings indicate that this approach can enhance image edges efficiently while suppressing noise.

Small lung nodules detection based on local variance analysis and probabilistic neural network

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE

In medical examinations doctors use various techniques in order to provide to the patients an accurate analysis of their actual state of health. One of the commonly used methodologies is the x-ray screening. This examination very often help to diagnose some diseases of chest organs. The most frequent cause of wrong diagnosis lie in the radiologist's difficulty in interpreting the presence of lungs carcinoma in chest X-ray. In such circumstances, an automated approach could be highly advantageous as it provides important help in medical diagnosis.

METHODS

In this paper we propose a new classification method of the lung carcinomas. This method start with the localization and extraction of the lung nodules by computing, for each pixel of the original image, the local variance obtaining an output image (variance image) with the same size of the original image. In the variance image we find the local maxima and then by using the locations of these maxima in the original image we found the contours of the possible nodules in lung tissues. However after this segmentation stage we find many false nodules. Therefore to discriminate the true ones we use a probabilistic neural network as classifier.

RESULTS

The performance of our approach is 92% of correct classifications, while the sensitivity is 95% and the specificity is 89.7%. The misclassification errors are due to the fact that network confuses false nodules with the true ones (6%) and true nodules with the false ones (2%).

CONCLUSIONS

Several researchers have proposed automated algorithms to detect and classify pulmonary nodules but these methods fail to detect low-contrast nodules and have a high computational complexity, in contrast our method is relatively simple but at the same time provides good results and can detect low-contrast nodules. Furthermore, in this paper is presented a new algorithm for training the PNN neural networks that allows to obtain PNNs with many fewer neurons compared to the neural networks obtained by using the training algorithms present in the literature. So considerably lowering the computational burden of the trained network and at same time keeping the same performances.

Computer-aided diagnosis based on enhancement of degraded fundus photographs

PURPOSE

Retinal imaging is an important and effective tool for detecting retinal diseases. However, degraded images caused by the aberrations of the eye can disguise lesions, so that a diseased eye can be mistakenly diagnosed as normal. In this work, we propose a new image enhancement method to improve the quality of degraded images.

METHODS

A new method is used to enhance degraded-quality fundus images. In this method, the image is converted from the input RGB colour space to LAB colour space and then each normalized component is enhanced using contrast-limited adaptive histogram equalization. Human visual system (HVS)-based fundus image quality assessment, combined with diagnosis by experts, is used to evaluate the enhancement.

RESULTS

The study included 191 degraded-quality fundus photographs of 143 subjects with optic media opacity. Objective quality assessment of image enhancement (range: 0-1) indicated that our method improved colour retinal image quality from an average of 0.0773 (variance 0.0801) to an average of 0.3973 (variance 0.0756). Following enhancement, area under curves (AUC) were 0.996 for the glaucoma classifier, 0.989 for the diabetic retinopathy (DR) classifier, 0.975 for the age-related macular degeneration (AMD) classifier and 0.979 for the other retinal diseases classifier.

CONCLUSION

The relatively simple method for enhancing degraded-quality fundus images achieves superior image enhancement, as demonstrated in a qualitative HVS-based image quality assessment. This retinal image enhancement may, therefore, be employed to assist ophthalmologists in more efficient screening of retinal diseases and the development of computer-aided diagnosis.