Automated mediastinal lymph node detection from CT volumes based on intensity targeted radial structure tensor analysis

Oda H, Bhatia KK, Oda M, Kitasaka T, Iwano S, Homma H, Takabatake H, Mori M, Natori H, Schnabel JA, Mori K (2017)

Publication Type: Journal article

Publication year: 2017

Journal

Journal of Medical Imaging Society of Photo-optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE)

Book Volume: 4

Article Number: 044502

Journal Issue: 4

DOI: 10.1117/1.JMI.4.4.044502

Abstract

This paper presents a local intensity structure analysis based on an intensity targeted radial structure tensor (ITRST) and the blob-like structure enhancement filter based on it (ITRST filter) for the mediastinal lymph node detection algorithm from chest computed tomography (CT) volumes. Although the filter based on radial structure tensor analysis (RST filter) based on conventional RST analysis can be utilized to detect lymph nodes, some lymph nodes adjacent to regions with extremely high or low intensities cannot be detected. Therefore, we propose the ITRST filter, which integrates the prior knowledge on detection target intensity range into the RST filter. Our lymph node detection algorithm consists of two steps: (1) obtaining candidate regions using the ITRST filter and (2) removing false positives (FPs) using the support vector machine classifier. We evaluated lymph node detection performance of the ITRST filter on 47 contrast-enhanced chest CT volumes and compared it with the RST and Hessian filters. The detection rate of the ITRST filter was 84.2% with 9.1 FPs/volume for lymph nodes whose short axis was at least 10 mm, which outperformed the RST and Hessian filters.

Involved external institutions

Nagoya University / 名古屋大学 JP Japan (JP) King’s College London GB United Kingdom (GB) Aichi Institute of Technology (AIT) / 愛知工業大学 JP Japan (JP) Sapporo-Kosei General Hospital / JA北海道厚生連札幌厚生病院 JP Japan (JP) Keiwakai Nishioka Hospital / 社会医療法人恵和会 西岡病院 JP Japan (JP)

How to cite

APA:

Oda, H., Bhatia, K.K., Oda, M., Kitasaka, T., Iwano, S., Homma, H.,... Mori, K. (2017). Automated mediastinal lymph node detection from CT volumes based on intensity targeted radial structure tensor analysis. Journal of Medical Imaging, 4(4). https://dx.doi.org/10.1117/1.JMI.4.4.044502

MLA:

Oda, Hirohisa, et al. "Automated mediastinal lymph node detection from CT volumes based on intensity targeted radial structure tensor analysis." Journal of Medical Imaging 4.4 (2017).

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