A multiscale Laplacian of Gaussian filtering approach to automated pulmonary nodule detection from whole-lung low-dose CT scans

The primary stage of a pulmonary nodule detection system is typically a candidate generator that efficiently provides the centroid location and size estimate of candidate nodules. A scale-normalized Laplacian of Gaussian (LOG) filtering method presented in this paper has been found to provide high sensitivity along with precise locality and size estimation. This approach involves a computationally efficient algorithm that is designed to identify all solid nodules in a whole lung anisotropic CT scan. This nodule candidate generator has been evaluated in conjunction with a set of discriminative features that target both isolated and attached nodules. The entire detection system was evaluated with respect to a size-enriched dataset of 656 whole-lung low-dose CT scans containing 459 solid nodules with diameter greater than 4 mm. Using a soft margin SVM classifier, and setting false positive rate of 10 per scan, we obtained a sensitivity of 97% for isolated, 93% for attached, and 89% for both nodule types combined. Furthermore, the LOG filter was shown to have good agreement with the radiologist ground truth for size estimation.