Comparison of Conventional and Deep Learning Based Methods for Pulmonary Nodule Segmentation in CT Images

• Type: Article in International Conference Proceedings Book
• Date: 2019-09-03

Authors

Joana Rocha (Author) FEUP; António Cunha (Author) Other; Ana Maria Mendonça (Author) FEUP

Conference proceedings International

Title: Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)

Pages: 361-371

19th EPIA Conference on Artificial Intelligence, EPIA 2019

3 September 2019 through 6 September 2019

Indexing

ISI Web of Knowledge - 5 Citations

Scopus - 4 Citations

Other information

Authenticus ID: P-00R-4G1

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-30241-2_31

Abstract (EN): Lung cancer is among the deadliest diseases in the world. The detection and characterization of pulmonary nodules are crucial for an accurate diagnosis, which is of vital importance to increase the patients¿ survival rates. The segmentation process contributes to the mentioned characterization, but faces several challenges, due to the diversity in nodular shape, size, and texture, as well as the presence of adjacent structures. This paper proposes two methods for pulmonary nodule segmentation in Computed Tomography (CT) scans. First, a conventional approach which applies the Sliding Band Filter (SBF) to estimate the center of the nodule, and consequently the filter¿s support points, matching the initial border coordinates. This preliminary segmentation is then refined to include mainly the nodular area, and no other regions (e.g. vessels and pleural wall). The second approach is based on Deep Learning, using the U-Net to achieve the same goal. This work compares both performances, and consequently identifies which one is the most promising tool to promote early lung cancer screening and improve nodule characterization. Both methodologies used 2653 nodules from the LIDC database: the SBF based one achieved a Dice score of 0.663, while the U-Net achieved 0.830, yielding more similar results to the ground truth reference annotated by specialists, and thus being a more reliable approach. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019.

Language: English

Type (Professor's evaluation): Scientific

No. of pages: 11