Candidate Tumor Site Detection

This chapter describes an accumulator array procedure which finds the small areas within the lung fields most likely to contain nodules. These areas are referred to as “candidate nodule sites”. The procedure is effective from the following points of view: (a) it occupies relatively little space in the computer, (b) it finds sets of candidate tumor sites that in almost all cases include all the tumors in the radiograph, (c) the total size of the sets of candidate sites is less than 1% of the area in the radiograph, and (d) the size of the candidate nodules is determined. The size of the nodules is particularly important as this is used to guide the dynamic programming algorithm which finds a detailed boundary for each candidate nodule site.