Computer-aided focal liver lesion detection

Purpose Our aim is to develop an automatic method which can detect diverse focal liver lesions (FLLs) in 3D CT volumes.Method   A hybrid generative-discriminative framework is proposed. It first uses a generative model to describe non-lesion components and then identifies all candidate FLLs within a 3D liver volume by eliminating non-lesion components. It subsequently uses a discriminative approach to suppress false positives with the advantage of tumoroid, a novel measurement combining three shape features spherical symmetry, compactness and size.Results   This method was tested on 71 abdominal CT datasets (5,854 slices from 61 patients, with 261 FLLs covering six pathological types) and evaluated using the free-response receiver operating characteristic (FROC) curves. Overall, it achieved a true positive rate of 90 % with one false positive per liver. It degenerated gently with the decrease in lesion sizes to 30 ml. It achieved a true-positive rate of 36 % when tested on the lesions less than 4 ml. The average computing time of the lesion detection is 4 min and 28 s per CT volume on a PC with 2.67 GHz CPU and 4.0 GB RAM.Conclusions   The proposed method is comparable to the radiologists’ visual investigation in terms of efficiency. The tool has great potential to reduce radiologists’ burden in going through thousands of images routinely.