Computer assisted solitary pulmonary nodules morphological enhancement characteristics - a preliminary study

The quantity analysis on Solitary Pulmonary Nodules (SPN) is very important for pulmonary disease diagnosis and prediction, especially, in the early phase or small sizes. Due to the breathing activity of patients, the SPN region is translated and deformed after the injection of bolus so that it is hard to obtain the exact enhancement patterns. In this presentation, we give an approach to combine plain CT images and enhanced CT images to assist the radiologists in SPN diagnosis or prediction. First we segmented SPN region in both the plain image and the enhanced image, then rigid and deformable registration method were carried out to match the enhanced SPN region to the plain SPN region, then we subtracted the SPN region from the enhanced SPN region to show the enhancement, finally we correlated the enhancement characteristics with corresponding diagnosis results.