Lung nodule volume measurement using digital chest tomosynthesis

Abstract

Lung cancer detection is one of the most important goals of medical diagnosis. To detect lung nodules usually classical X-ray and/or computed tomography (CT) images are used. The progression of the disease can be monitored if the doubling time of the volume of a pulmonary nodule is determined and followed, which means that the volume of a nodule has to be measured/estimated. To measure the nodule volume using classical Xray images is almost impossible, while a CT-based diagnosis is rather expensive. Recently a new radiological image-based modality, digital tomosynthesis (DTS) has been developed. DTS can be considered as a 2.5D modality, where coronal slice images of a chest can be computed. The spatial resolution of a DTS image is much higher than that of a CT image, while the thickness of a slice is larger compared to a CT image. Thus DTS can also be used to determine lung nodule volumes although -because of the 2.5D reconstruction -volume estimation is a rather hard task. This paper proposes a new way for estimating nodule volume. The method was developed using an experimental database, which contains reconstructed images of 16 simulated small, elliptical nodules, placed into an anthropomorphic chest phantom, and was evaluated by a few real DTS images and an image base made from simulated projections from a public CT database.

Digital chest tomosynthesis: The main steps to a computer assisted lung diagnostic system

“…The effective slice thicknes monotonically decreasing func the reconstructed signal [13]. T reconstructed anatomic structu visible in blurred version in so ral slice.…”

“…(The chance that a nodule generates a candidate at more than 3 slices away from its central slice is negligible). In the segmentation step GVF regularized ACM Snake algorithm (for details see [13]) is applied.…”

“…This segmentation is based on a slightly modified version of GVF regularized ACM Snake. The details are written in [13]. The size of the candidates along the PA axis was estimated by a 3D ideal spherical model (it is determined by the i template index of (1)).…”

Accurate Volume Calculation Driven by Delaunay Triangulation for Coal Measurement

“…In [9,10], the tank is approximated to a cylinder. Hadhazi et al [7] place 16 simulated small elliptical nodules into an anthropomorphic chest phantom to calculate the lung nodule volume. Because the real objects are not standard geometry, the error is very large for these methods.…”

“…Volume calculation is to compute the space occupied by an object through point cloud that generated from 3D reconstruction. Volume calculation underpins many crucial applications, such as the volume measurement of coal [1], ore [2], earthwork [3], and tree [4,5] and the disease diagnosis in medical field [6,7]. is paper aims to the coal measurement, where volume calculation has been a challenging task due to the difficulty in determining the object boundary from the scatters of point cloud.…”