Acoustical markers for CAD-detected pulmonary nodules in chest CT: a way to avoid suggestion and distraction of radiologist's attention?

Purpose: To compare the influence of visual and acoustical CAD markers on radiologist's performance with regard to suggestive and distractive effects. Materials and methods: Ten radiologists analyzed 150 pictures of chest CT slices. Every picture contained a visual CAD marker. 100 pictures showed one nodule: CAD marker marked this in 50 cases and in 50 cases a false positive finding (f.p.). The other 50 cases showed no nodule but an f.p. marker. After 3 years same images were presented to thirteen radiologists with only a sound as CAD marker. 55 of 150 images were marked, 30 true positive and 25 f.p. Sensitivity and f.p. rate were calculated for both marker types. Significance between sensitivities and f.p. rates were calculated by multiple-analysis-of-variance (MANOVA). Results: Without CAD mean sensitivity resp. f.p. were 57.7% /.13. In case of correct optical resp. acoustical marker sensitivity increased to 75.6% resp. 63.1 %. For incorrect set marker mean f.p. rate increased to .31 resp..24. MANOVA showed that marker's correctness highly significantly influenced sensitivity (p<.001) and f.n. (p=.005). Type of marker showed no significant influence on sensitivity (p=.26) or f.n. (p=.23) but on f.p. (p<.001). New work to be presented: Acoustical markers are a new means to increase radiologist's awareness of the presence of pulmonary nodules at CT scans with much less suggestive effect compared to optical markers. Conclusion: We found an unexpectedly low distraction effect for misplaced CAD markers. A suggestive effect was remarkable especially for optical markers. However acoustical markers offered less increase of sensitivity. The growth rate of pulmonary nodules has been shown to be an indicator of malignancy, and previous work on pulmonary nodule characterization has suggested that the asymmetry of a nodule's shape may be correlated with malignancy. We have also observed that measurements in the axial direction on CT scans are less repeatable than measurements in-plane and this should be considered when making lesion size-change measurements. To address this, we present a method to measure the asymmetry of a pulmonary nodule's growth by the use of second-order central moments that are insensitive to z-direction variation. The difference in the moment ratios on each scan is used as a measure of the asymmetry of growth. To establish what level of difference is significant, the 95% confidence interval of the differences was determined on a zero-change dataset of 22 solid pulmonary nodules with repeat scans in the same session. This method was applied to a set of 47 solid, stable pulmonary nodules and a set of 49 solid, malignant nodules. The confidence interval established from the zero-change dataset was (-0.45, 0.38); nodules with differences outside this confidence interval are considered to have asymmetric growth. Of the 47 stable nodules, 12.8% (6/47) were found to have asymmetric growth compared to 24.5% (12/49) of malignant nodules. These preliminary results suggest that nodules with asymmetric growth can be identified.