A new procedure for lung region segmentation from computed tomography images

Abstract

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death among people worldwide. The primary aim of this research is to establish an image processing method for lung cancer detection. This paper focuses on lung region segmentation from computed tomography (CT) scan images. In this work, a new procedure for lung region segmentation is proposed. First, the lung CT scan images will undergo an image thresholding stage before going through two morphological reconstruction and masking stages. In between morphological and masking stages, object extraction, border change, and object elimination will occur. Finally, the lung field will be annotated. The outcomes of the proposed procedure and previous lung segmentation methods i.e., the modified watershed segmentation method is compared with the ground truth images for performance evaluation that will be carried out both in qualitative and quantitative manners. Based on the analyses, the new proposed procedure for lung segmentation, denotes better performance, an increment by 0.02% to 3.5% in quantitative analysis. The proposed procedure produced better-segmented images for qualitative analysis and became the most frequently selected method by the 22 experts. This study shows that the outcome from the proposed method outperforms the existing modified watershed segmentation method.