Extraction of GGO candidate regions from the LIDC database using deep learning

In recent years, development of the computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems for the purpose of reducing the false positive on visual screening and improving accuracy of lesion detection has been advanced. Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in the world. Among them, GGO (Ground Glass Opacity) that exhibited early in the before cancer lesion and carcinoma in situ shows a pale concentration, have been concerned about the possibility of undetected on the screening. In this paper, we propose an automatic extraction method of GGO candidate regions from the chest CT image. Our proposed image processing algorithms is consist of four main steps; 1) segmentation of volume of interest from the chest CT image and removing the blood vessel regions, bronchus regions based on 3D line filter, 2) first detection of GGO regions based on density and gradient which is selected the initial GGO candidate regions, 3) identification of the final GGO candidate regions based on DCNN (Deep Convolutional Neural Network) algorithms. Finally, we calculates the statistical features for reducing the false-positive (FP) shadow by the rule-based method, performs identification of the final GGO candidate regions by SVM (Support Vector Machine). Our proposed method performed on to the 31 cases of the LIDC (Lung Image Database Consortium) database, and final identification performance of TP: 93.02[%], FP: 128.52[/case] are obtained respectively.