Towards Automated Reporting and Visualization of Lymph Node Metastases of Lung Cancer

For lung cancer staging, the involvement of lymph nodes in the mediastinum, meaning along the trachea and bronchi, has to be assessed. Depending on the staging results, treatment options include radiation therapy, chemotherapy, or lymph node resection. We present a processing pipeline to automatically generate visualization-supported case reports to simplify reporting and to improve interdisciplinary communication, e. g. between nuclear medicine physicians, radiologists, radiation oncologists, and thoracic surgeons. To evaluate our method, we obtained detailed feedback from the local division of nuclear medicine: Although patient-specific anatomy was not yet considered, the presented approach was deemed to be highly useful from a clinical perspective.