An Edge Detection Method for Suspicious Local Regions in CT images with Jaxtapleural Nodules

Abstract

Juxtapleural lung nodules are often excluded from the lung region in many CT image processing algorithms which are based on intensity information. For solving this problem, a suspicious edge line detection algorithm is proposed to obtain the edge line of the suspicious local lung region in this manuscript. Firstly, the lung region in the CT image is extracted by a fixed threshold. Then a SIFT algorithm is used to detect the feature point in the lung region. To filter out the useless feature points, a closest point matching method is used. Then a K-mean method is introduced to divide those feature points into several parts in which the edges of juxtapleural Lung nodules are contained. Experiments over CT slices show that the proposed method has a great performance in detecting the edge line of suspicious regions.