Juxta-Vascular Nodule Segmentation Based on Flow Entropy and Geodesic Distance

Lung Nodule Detection from Feature Engineering to Deep Learning in Thoracic CT Images: a Comprehensive Review

This paper presents a systematic review of the literature focused on the lung nodule detection in chest computed tomography (CT) images. Manual detection of lung nodules by the radiologist is a sequential and time-consuming process. The detection is subjective and depends on the radiologist's experiences. Owing to the variation in shapes and appearances of a lung nodule, it is very difficult to identify the proper location of the nodule from a huge number of slices generated by the CT scanner. Small nodules (< 10 mm in diameter) may be missed by this manual detection process. Therefore, computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system acts as a "second opinion" for the radiologists, by making final decision quickly with higher accuracy and greater confidence. The goal of this survey work is to present the current state of the artworks and their progress towards lung nodule detection to the researchers and readers in this domain. This review paper has covered the published works from 2009 to April 2018. Different nodule detection approaches are described elaborately in this work. Recently, it is observed that deep learning (DL)-based approaches are applied extensively for nodule detection and characterization. Therefore, emphasis has been given to convolutional neural network (CNN)-based DL approaches by describing different CNN-based networks.

A prognostic analysis method for non-small cell lung cancer based on the computed tomography radiomics

In order to assist doctors in arranging the postoperative treatments and re-examinations for non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients, this study was initiated to explore a prognostic analysis method for NSCLC based on computed tomography (CT) radiomics. The data of 173 NSCLC patients were collected retrospectively and the clinically meaningful 3-year survival was used as the predictive limit to predict the patient's prognosis survival time range. Firstly, lung tumors were segmented and the radiomics features were extracted. Secondly, the feature weighting algorithm was used to screen and optimize the extracted original feature data. Then, the selected feature data combining with the prognosis survival of patients were used to train machine learning classification models. Finally, a prognostic survival prediction model and radiomics prognostic factors were obtained to predict the prognosis survival time range of NSCLC patients. The classification accuracy rate under cross-validation was up to 88.7% in the prognosis survival analysis model. When verifying on an independent data set, the model also yielded a high prediction accuracy which is up to 79.6%. Inverse different moment, lobulation sign and angular second moment were NSCLC prognostic factors based on radiomics. This study proved that CT radiomics features could effectively assist doctors to make more accurate prognosis survival prediction for NSCLC patients, so as to help doctors to optimize treatment and re-examination for NSCLC patients to extend their survival time.

Juxta-Vascular Pulmonary Nodule Segmentation in PET-CT Imaging Based on an LBF Active Contour Model with Information Entropy and Joint Vector

The accurate segmentation of pulmonary nodules is an important preprocessing step in computer-aided diagnoses of lung cancers. However, the existing segmentation methods may cause the problem of edge leakage and cannot segment juxta-vascular pulmonary nodules accurately. To address this problem, a novel automatic segmentation method based on an LBF active contour model with information entropy and joint vector is proposed in this paper. Our method extracts the interest area of pulmonary nodules by a standard uptake value (SUV) in Positron Emission Tomography (PET) images, and automatic threshold iteration is used to construct an initial contour roughly. The SUV information entropy and the gray-value joint vector of Positron Emission Tomography–Computed Tomography (PET-CT) images are calculated to drive the evolution of contour curve. At the edge of pulmonary nodules, evolution will be stopped and accurate results of pulmonary nodule segmentation can be obtained. Experimental results show that our method can achieve 92.35% average dice similarity coefficient, 2.19 mm Hausdorff distance, and 3.33% false positive with the manual segmentation results. Compared with the existing methods, our proposed method that segments juxta-vascular pulmonary nodules in PET-CT images is more accurate and efficient.

A segmentation method for lung nodule image sequences based on superpixels and density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise

The fast and accurate segmentation of lung nodule image sequences is the basis of subsequent processing and diagnostic analyses. However, previous research investigating nodule segmentation algorithms cannot entirely segment cavitary nodules, and the segmentation of juxta-vascular nodules is inaccurate and inefficient. To solve these problems, we propose a new method for the segmentation of lung nodule image sequences based on superpixels and density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN). First, our method uses three-dimensional computed tomography image features of the average intensity projection combined with multi-scale dot enhancement for preprocessing. Hexagonal clustering and morphological optimized sequential linear iterative clustering (HMSLIC) for sequence image oversegmentation is then proposed to obtain superpixel blocks. The adaptive weight coefficient is then constructed to calculate the distance required between superpixels to achieve precise lung nodules positioning and to obtain the subsequent clustering starting block. Moreover, by fitting the distance and detecting the change in slope, an accurate clustering threshold is obtained. Thereafter, a fast DBSCAN superpixel sequence clustering algorithm, which is optimized by the strategy of only clustering the lung nodules and adaptive threshold, is then used to obtain lung nodule mask sequences. Finally, the lung nodule image sequences are obtained. The experimental results show that our method rapidly, completely and accurately segments various types of lung nodule image sequences.