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Updated: Mar 21, 2026
Author Spotlight: Advancing 3D Modeling for Enhanced Diagnosis and Treatment of Pulmonary Nodules in Early-Stage Lung Cancer
Published on: October 13, 2023
Segmentation of pulmonary nodules using adaptive local region energy with probability density function-based
Bin Li1, QingLin Chen2, Guangming Peng3
1School of Automation Science and Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, 510640, Guangdong, China. binlee@scut.edu.cn.
Background:
Pulmonary nodules in computerized tomography (CT) images are potential manifestations of lung cancer. Segmentation of potential nodule objects is the first necessary and crucial step in computer-aided detection system of pulmonary nodules. The segmentation of various types of nodules, especially for ground-glass opacity (GGO) nodules and juxta-vascular nodules, present various challenges. The nodule with GGO characteristic possesses typical intensity inhomogeneity and weak edges, which is difficult to define the boundary; the juxta-vascular nodule is connected to a vessel, and they have very similar intensities. Traditional segmentation methods may result in the problems of boundary leakage and a small volume over-segmentation. This paper deals with the above mentioned problems.
Methods:
A novel segmentation method for pulmonary nodules is proposed, which uses an adaptive local region energy model with probability density function (PDF)-based similarity distance and multi-features dynamic clustering refinement method. Our approach has several novel aspects: (1) in the proposed adaptive local region energy model, the local domain for local energy model is selected adaptively based on k-nearest-neighbour (KNN) estimate method, and measurable distances between probability density functions of multi-dimension features with high class separability are used to build the cost function. (2) A multi-features dynamic clustering method is used for the segmentation refinement of juxta-vascular nodules, which is based on the nodule segmentation using active contour model (ACM) with adaptive local region energy and vessel segmentation using flow direction feature (FDF)-based region growing method. (3) it handles various types of nodules under a united framework.
Results:
The proposed method has been validated on a clinical dataset of 113 chest CT scans that contain 157 nodules determined by a ground truth reading process, and evaluating the algorithm on the provided data leads to an average Tanimoto/Jaccard error of 0.17, 0.20 and 0.24 for GGO, juxta-vascular and GGO juxta-vascular nodules, respectively.
Conclusions:
Experimental results show desirable performances of the proposed method. The proposed segmentation method outperforms the traditional methods.
