Experimental investigation of fuzzy enhancement for nonsolid pulmonary nodules

Abstract

Computer-Aided Detection(CAD) for pulmonary nodules on CT images can help radiologist find pulmonary nodules efficiently and decrease the rate of missed diagnosis, which provides a way for lung cancer diagnosis in early stage. Compared with the solid pulmonary nodules which have regular shape, clear edge and high density, the detection of the nonsolid pulmonary nodules with irregular shape, blurry edge and low contrast to lung parenchyma is more difficult. In order to detect the nonsolid pulmonary nodules using CAD systems, the image enhancement for nonsolid pulmonary nodules' contrast to lung parenchyma is necessary. Therefore, we performed an experimental investigation of fuzzy enhancement algorithms for nonsolid pulmonary nodules in this paper. Experimental results show that the proposed method is valid in the enhancement of nonsolid pulmonary nodules' contrast to lung parenchyma, meanwhile, it decreases the disturbance of the blood vessels.