Learning with distribution of optimized features for recognizing common CT imaging signs of lung diseases

Common CT imaging signs of lung diseases (CISLs) are defined as the imaging signs that frequently appear in lung CT images from patients. CISLs play important roles in the diagnosis of lung diseases. This paper proposes a novel learning method, namely learning with distribution of optimized feature (DOF), to effectively recognize the characteristics of CISLs. We improve the classification performance by learning the optimized features under different distributions. Specifically, we adopt the minimum spanning tree algorithm to capture the relationship between features and discriminant ability of features for selecting the most important features. To overcome the problem of various distributions in one CISL, we propose a hierarchical learning method. First, we use an unsupervised learning method to cluster samples into groups based on their distribution. Second, in each group, we use a supervised learning method to train a model based on their categories of CISLs. Finally, we obtain multiple classification decisions from multiple trained models and use majority voting to achieve the final decision. The proposed approach has been implemented on a set of 511 samples captured from human lung CT images and achieves a classification accuracy of 91.96%. The proposed DOF method is effective and can provide a useful tool for computer-aided diagnosis of lung diseases on CT images.