Computer-aided diagnosis systems for lung cancer: challenges and methodologies

This paper overviews one of the most important, interesting, and challenging problems in oncology, the problem of lung cancer diagnosis. Developing an effective computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system for lung cancer is of great clinical importance and can increase the patient's chance of survival. For this reason, CAD systems for lung cancer have been investigated in a huge number of research studies. A typical CAD system for lung cancer diagnosis is composed of four main processing steps: segmentation of the lung fields, detection of nodules inside the lung fields, segmentation of the detected nodules, and diagnosis of the nodules as benign or malignant. This paper overviews the current state-of-the-art techniques that have been developed to implement each of these CAD processing steps. For each technique, various aspects of technical issues, implemented methodologies, training and testing databases, and validation methods, as well as achieved performances, are described. In addition, the paper addresses several challenges that researchers face in each implementation step and outlines the strengths and drawbacks of the existing approaches for lung cancer CAD systems.