Recognition of Pulmonary Nodules in Thoracic CT Scans Using 3-D Deformable Object Models of Different Classes

The present paper describes a novel recognition method of pulmonary nodules (i.e., cancer candidates) in thoracic computed tomography scans by use of three-dimensional spherical and cylindrical models that represent nodules and blood vessels, respectively. The anatomical validity of these object models and their fidelity to computed tomography scans are evaluated based on the Bayes theorem. The nodule recognition is employed by the maximum a posteriori estimation. The proposed method is applied to 26 actual computed tomography scans, and experimental results are shown.