An Fully Automated CAD System for Juxta-Vacular Nodules Segmentation in CT Scan Images

Early detection of all kinds of lung nodules with different characters in patient's medical modality images is the best acceptable remedy to save the life of lung cancer sufferers. Even though day by day the prominence of Computer-Aided Detection/Diagnosis (CADe/x) systems have been increasing as a part of medical routine in detection of different types of lung nodules, but detection rate performance depends on accuracy of lung parenchyma and nodule segmentation procedures. Segmentation of Juxta-Vascular nodules attached very complex. In this paper new fully automated CAD system is developed to detect and classify Juxta-Vascular nodules. In proposed methodology, lung parenchyma is segmented using iterative thresholding algorithm and lung nodules are segmented using proposed modified region growing algorithm. Since in vascular nodules, separation of blood vessel from nodule is difficult as intensity feature of attached blood vessel and nodule is same. Two new methods nodule segmentation method and vessel removal based on multi features to separate the vascular nodule part from the attached blood vessels are developed. To achieve the higher nodule-vessel separation accuracy, nodule-vessel attached region is refined. Validation of proposed method is performed on LIDC-CT lung images. A fully automated method segments the vascular nodules with less computational time and high accuracy.