3D skeletonization feature based computer-aided detection system for pulmonary nodules in CT datasets

Pulmonary nodule detection has a significant impact on early diagnosis of lung cancer. To effectively detect pulmonary nodules from interferential vessels in chest CT datasets, this paper proposes a novel 3D skeletonization feature, named as voxels remove rate. Based on this feature, a computer-aided detection system is constructed to validate its performance. The system mainly consists of five stages. Firstly, the lung tissues are segmented by a global optimal active contour model, which can extract all structures (including juxta-pleural nodules) in the lung region. Secondly, thresholding, 3D binary morphological operations, and 3D connected components labeling are utilized to extract candidates of pulmonary nodules. Thirdly, combining the voxels remove rate with other nine existing 3D features (including gray features and shape features), the extracted candidates are characterized. Then, prior anatomical knowledge is utilized for preliminary screening of numerous invalid nodule candidates. Finally, false positives are reduced by support vector machine. Our system is evaluated on early stage lung cancer subjects obtained from the publicly available LIDC-IDRI database. The result shows the proposed 3D skeletonization feature is a useful indicator that efficiently differentiates lung nodules from the other suspicious structures. The computer-aided detection system based on this feature can detect various types of nodules, including solitary, juxta-pleural and juxta-vascular nodules.