Shape analysis of pulmonary nodules based on thin section CT images

Shape characterization of small pulmonary nodules plays a significant role in differential diagnosis that discriminates malignant and benign nodules at early stages of pulmonary lesion development. This paper presents a method to characterize small pulmonary nodules based on the morphology of the development of lung lesions in thin section CT images. The feature extraction process focuses on the difference between the malignant and benign surface characteristics. Experiments to show its feasibility to improve the diagnostic accuracy are also demonstrated by applying the algorithm to eighteen cases including twelve malignant and six benign nodules.