Shape and texture based novel features for automated juxtapleural nodule detection in lung CTs

Lung cancer is one of the types of cancer with highest mortality rate in the world. In case of early detection and diagnosis, the survival rate of patients significantly increases. In this study, a novel method and system that provides automatic detection of juxtapleural nodule pattern have been developed from cross-sectional images of lung CT (Computerized Tomography). Shape-based and both shape and texture based 7 features are contributed to the literature for lung nodules. System that we developed consists of six main stages called preprocessing, lung segmentation, detection of nodule candidate regions, feature extraction, feature selection (with five feature ranking criteria) and classification. LIDC dataset containing cross-sectional images of lung CT has been utilized, 1410 nodule candidate regions and 40 features have been extracted from 138 cross-sectional images for 24 patients. Experimental results for 10 classifiers are obtained and presented. Adding our derived features to known 33 features has increased nodule recognition performance from 0.9639 to 0.9679 AUC value on generalized linear model regression (GLMR) for 22 selected features and being reached one of the most successful results in the literature.