An Optimal Level Sets Method for Lung Nodules Detection in CT Images

Chan-Vese's image segmentation method proposed based on level sets method is studied and improved in this paper. A new level set method has been presented, which combines the average values of global regions and local boundary information, and it is used for lung nodules detection for CT images. The experiment results verify that it is a robust way for the segmentation of lung body and the detection for lung nodules, the speed of calculation is faster than that of Chan-Vese's. Moreover, the detection results are independed on the initial settings, so the manual mutuality can be reduced to the minimum, it is an effective method for CT image lung nodule detection automatically.