BREATH: Heat Maps Assisting the Detection of Abnormal Lung Regions in CT Scans

Computed Tomography (CT) scans are often employed to diagnose lung diseases, as abnormal tissue regions may indicate whether proper treatment is required. However, detecting specific regions containing abnormalities in a CT scan demands time and effort of specialists. Moreover, different parts of a single lung image may present both normal and abnormal characteristics, what makes inaccurate the classification of a single lung as healthy (normal) or not. In this paper we propose the BREATH method, capable of detecting abnormalities in lung tissue regions, highlighting them by means of a heat map visualization. The method starts by segmenting lung tissues using a superpixel-based approach, followed by the training of a statistical model to represent normal tissues and, finally, the generation of a heat map showing abnormal regions that require attention from the physicians. We validated our statistical model using a dataset with 246 lung CT scans, where 40 are healthy and the remaining present varying diseases. Experimental results show that BREATH is accurate for lung segmentation with F-Measure of up to 0.99. The statistical modeling of healthy and abnormal lung regions has shown almost no overlap, and the detection of superpixels containing abnormalities presented precision values higher than 86%, for all values of recall. These values support our claim that the heat map representation of BREATH for the abnormal detection can be used as an intuitive method to assist physicians during the diagnosis.