Abstract
Purpose
Boundary roughness of a pulmonary nodule is an important indication of its malignancy. The irregularity of the shape of a nodule is represented in terms of a few diagnostic characteristics such as spiculation, lobulation, and sphericity. Quantitative characterization of these diagnostic characteristics is essential for designing a content-based image retrieval system and computer-aided system for diagnosis of lung cancer.
Methods
This paper presents differential geometry-based techniques for computation of spiculation, lobulation, and sphericity using the binary mask of the segmented nodule. These shape features are computed in 3D considering complete nodule.
Results
The performance of the proposed and competing methods is evaluated in terms of the precision, mean similarity, and normalized discounted cumulative gain on 891 nodules of Lung Image Database Consortium and Image Database Resource Initiative. The proposed methods are comparable to or better than gold standard technique. The reproducibility of proposed feature extraction techniques is evaluated using RIDER coffee break data set. The mean and standard deviation of the percent change of spiculation, lobulation, and sphericity are \(1.66\pm 2.36\), \(10.57\pm 11.63\), and \(6.27\pm 7.99\) %, respectively.
Conclusion
The prior works of computation of spiculation, lobulation, and sphericity require a set of four ground truths from radiologists and, hence, can not be used in practice. The proposed methods do not require ground truth information of nodules from radiologists, and hence, it can be used in real-life computer-aided diagnosis system for lung cancer.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Siegel R, Naishadham D, Jemal A (2013) Cancer statistics. CA Cancer J Clin 63(1):11–30
Diederich S, Wormanns D, Semik M, Thomas M, Lenzen H, Roos N, Heindel W (2002) Screening for early lung cancer with low-dose spiral CT: prevalence in 817 asymptomatic smokers. Radiology 222(3):773–781
Ko JP, Naidich DP (2004) Computer-aided diagnosis and the evaluation of lung disease. J Thorac Imaging 19(3):136–155
Ost D, Fein AM, Feinsilver SH (2003) The solitary pulmonary nodule. N Engl J Med 348(25):2535–2542
Horsthemke WH, Raicu DS, Furst JD (2009) Characterizing pulmonary nodule shape using a boundary-region approach. In: Proceedings of SPIE medical imaging 2009, vol 7260. Florida, pp 72602Y–72602Y-9
Raicu DS, Varutbangkul E, Cisneros JG, Furst JD, Channin DS, Armato SG III (2007) Semantics and image content integration for pulmonary nodule interpretation in thoracic computed tomography. In: Proceedings of SPIE medical imaging 2007, pp 65120S–65120S-12
Dhara AK, Mukhopadhyay S, Alam N, Khandelwal N (2013) Measurement of spiculation index in 3D for solitary pulmonary nodules in volumetric lung CT images. In: SPIE medical imaging 2013: computer aided diagnosis, vol 8670. Florida, pp 86700K–86700K-6
Teague MR (1980) Image analysis via the general theory of moments. J Opt Soc Am 70(8):920–930
McNitt-Gray MF, Armato SG III, Meyer CR, Reeves AP, McLennan G, Pais RC, Freymann J, Brown MS, Engelmann RM, Bland PH, Laderach GE, Piker C, Guo J, Towfic Z, Qing PYD, Yankelevitz DF, Aberle DR, Beek EJR, MacMahon H, Kazerooni EA, Croft BY, Clarke LP (2007) The lung image database consortium LIDC data collection process for nodule detection and annotation. Acad Radiol 14(12):1464–1474
Dhara AK, Mukhopadhyay S, Das Gupta R, Garg M, Khandelwal N (2015) A segmentation framework of pulmonary nodules in lung CT images. J Digit Imaging. doi:10.1007/s10278-015-9812-6
Tsai DM, Hou HT, Su HJ (1999) Boundary-based corner detection using eigenvalues of covariance matrices. Pattern Recogn Lett 20(1):31–40
Lorensen WE, Cline HE (1987) Marching cubes: a high resolution 3D surface construction algorithm. ACM Siggr Comput Graph 21:163–169
Koenderink JJ, van Doorn AJ (1992) Surface shape and curvature scales. Image Vis Comput 10(8):557–564
Dong C, Wang G (2005) Curvatures estimation on triangular mesh. J Zhejiang Univ Sci 6(1):128–136
Sladoje N, Nyström I, Saha PK (2005) Measurements of digitized objects with fuzzy borders in 2D and 3D. Image Vis Comput 23(2):123–132
McNitt-Gray MF, Kim GH, Zhao B, Schwartz LH, Clunie D, Cohen K, Petrick N, Fenimore C, Lu ZJ, Buckler AJ (2015) Determining the variability of lesion size measurements from ct patient data sets acquired under “no change” conditions. Transl Oncol 8(1):55–64
Armato SG III, McLennan G, Bidaut L, McNitt-Gray MF, Meyer CR, Reeves AP, Zhao B, Aberle DR, Henschke CI, Hoffman EA, Kazerooni EA, MacMahon H, Beek EJR, Yankelevitz D, Biancardi AM, Bland PH, Brown MS, Engelmann RM, Laderach GE, Max D, Pais RC, Qing DPY, Roberts RY, Smith AR, Starkey A, Batra P, Caligiuri P, Farooqi A, Gladish GW, Jude CM, Munden RF, Petkovska I, Quint LE, Schwartz LH, Sundaram B, Dodd LE, Fenimore C, Gur D, Petrick N, Freymann J, Kirby J, Hughes B, Casteele AV, Gupte S, Sallam M, Heath MD, Kuhn MH, Dharaiya E, Burns R, Fryd DS, Salganicoff M, Anand V, Shreter U, Vastagh S, Croft BY, Clarke LP (2011) The lung image database consortium (LIDC) and image database resource initiative (IDRI): a completed reference database of lung nodules on CT scans. Med Phys 38(2):915–931
Xu J, Napel S, Greenspan H, Beaulieu CF, Agrawal N, Rubin D (2012) Quantifying the margin sharpness of lesions on radiological images for content-based image retrieval. Med Phys 39(9):5405–5418
Järvelin K, Kekäläinen J (2002) Cumulated gain-based evaluation of ir techniques. ACM Trans Inf Syst 20(4):422–446
Seitz KA Jr, Giuca AM, Furst J, Raicu D (2012) Learning lung nodule similarity using a genetic algorithm. In: Proceedings of SPIE medical imaging 2012, vol 8315. San Deigo, USA, pp 831537–831537-7
Han F, Wang H, Zhang G, Han H, Song B, Li L, Moore W, Lu H, Zhao H, Liang Z (2014) Texture feature analysis for computer-aided diagnosis on pulmonary nodules. J Digit Imaging 28(1):99–115
Kostis WJ, Reeves AP, Yankelevitz DF, Henschke CI (2003) Three-dimensional segmentation and growth-rate estimation of small pulmonary nodules in helical CT images. IEEE Trans Med Imaging 22(10):1259–1274
Reeves AP, Chan AB, Yankelevitz DF, Henschke CI, Kressler B, Kostis WJ (2006) On measuring the change in size of pulmonary nodules. IEEE Trans Med Imaging 25(4):435–450
Teo BK, Seo Y, Bacharach SL, Carrasquillo JA, Libutti SK, Shukla H, Hasegawa BH, Hawkins RA, Franc BL (2007) Partial-volume correction in PET: validation of an iterative postreconstruction method with phantom and patient data. J Nucl Med 48(5):802–810
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflicts of interest
This study was funded by Department of Electronics and Information Technology, Govt. of India, Grant Number 1(3)2009-ME&TMD and 1(2) / 2013-ME&TMD/ESDA, respectively. The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest. This work is done using a public lung CT image data set, and for this type of study, formal consent is not required. This article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors. Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Dhara, A.K., Mukhopadhyay, S., Saha, P. et al. Differential geometry-based techniques for characterization of boundary roughness of pulmonary nodules in CT images. Int J CARS 11, 337–349 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11548-015-1284-0
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11548-015-1284-0