Computer-aided detection of ground glass nodules in thoracic CT images using shape, intensity and context features

Contains fulltext : 96752.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) Ground glass nodules (GGNs) occur less frequent in computed tomography (CT) scans than solid nodules but have a much higher chance of being malignant. Accurate detection of these nodules is therefore highly important. A complete system for computer-aided detection of GGNs is presented consisting of initial segmentation steps, candidate detection, feature extraction and a two-stage classification process. A rich set of intensity, shape and context features is constructed to describe the appearance of GGN candidates. We apply a two-stage classification approach using a linear discriminant classifier and a GentleBoost classifier to efficiently classify candidate regions. The system is trained and independently tested on 140 scans that contained one or more GGNs from around 10,000 scans obtained in a lung cancer screening trial. The system shows a high sensitivity of 73% at only one false positive per scan.