[CAD for identifying malignant lung nodules in early diagnosis: a survey]

It is of paramount importance for the diagnosis and therapy of lung cancer, even for the increasing of 5-year survival rate in that the early dignosis of malignant pulmonary nodules are made by intelligent identification successfully. As it stands, in intelligent identification of pulmonary nodules, computer-aided detection/diagnosis (CAD) plays the most important role. The key points of intelligent identification of pulmonary nodules are (1) Detecting pulmonary nodules based on the characterization of nodule appearance; (2) Measuring accurately the nodule size; (3) Computing accurately the growth rate. This article presents a review on the basic technologies and methods of CAD for identifying malignant pulmonary nodules in the course of making early diagnosis, including lung segmentation, registration of volume data, identification of benign/malignant pulmonary nodule, and so on.