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Computed tomography (CT) of the chest is a very common staging investigation for the assessment of mediastinal, hilar, and intrapulmonary lymph nodes in the context of lung cancer. In the current clinical workflow, the detection and assessment of lymph nodes is usually performed manually, which can be error-prone and timeconsuming. We therefore propose a method for the automatic detection of mediastinal, hilar, and intrapulmonary lymph node candidates in contrast-enhanced chest CT. Based on the segmentation of important mediastinal anatomy (bronchial tree, aortic arch) and making use of anatomical knowledge, we utilize Hessian eigenvalues to detect lymph node candidates. As lymph nodes can be characterized as blob-like structures of varying size and shape within a specific intensity interval, we can utilize these characteristics to reduce the number of false positive candidates significantly. We applied our method to 5 cases suspected to have lung cancer. The processing time of our algorithm did not exceed 6 minutes, and we achieved an average sensitivity of 82.1% and an average precision of 13.3%.

In this paper, we propose a hybrid method for tracking a bronchoscope that uses a combination of magnetic sensor tracking and image registration. The position of a magnetic sensor placed in the working channel of the bronchoscope is provided by a magnetic tracking system. Because of respiratory motion, the magnetic sensor provides only the approximate position and orientation of the bronchoscope in the coordinate system of a CT image acquired before the examination. The sensor position and orientation is used as the starting point for an intensity-based registration between real bronchoscopic video images and virtual bronchoscopic images generated from the CT image. The output transformation of the image registration process is the position and orientation of the bronchoscope in the CT image. We tested the proposed method using a bronchial phantom model. Virtual breathing motion was generated to simulate respiratory motion. The proposed hybrid method successfully tracked the bronchoscope at a rate of approximately 1 Hz.

Obtaining an accurate vehicle position is important for intelligent vehicles in supporting driver safety and comfort. This paper proposes an accurate ego-localization method by matching in-vehicle camera images to an aerial image. There are two major problems in performing an accurate matching: (1) image difference between the aerial image and the in-vehicle camera image due to view-point and illumination conditions, and (2) occlusions in the in-vehicle camera image. To solve the first problem, we use the SURF image descriptor, which achieves robust feature-point matching for the various image differences. Additionally, we extract appropriate feature-points from each road-marking region on the road plane in both images. For the second problem, we utilize sequential multiple in-vehicle camera frames in the matching. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method improves both ego-localization accuracy and stability.

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