High-contrast bone structures are a major noise contributor in chest radiographic images. A signal of interest in a chest radiograph could be either partially or completely obscured or “overshadowed” by the highly contrasted bone structures in its surrounding. Thus, removing the bone structures, especially the posterior rib and clavicle structures, is highly desirable to increase the visibility of soft tissue density. We developed an innovative technology that offers a solution to suppress bone structures, including posterior ribs and clavicles, on conventional and portable chest X-ray images. The bone-suppression image processing technology includes five major steps: 1) lung segmentation, 2) rib and clavicle structure detection, 3) rib and clavicle edge detection, 4) rib and clavicle profile estimation, and 5) suppression based on the estimated profiles. The bone-suppression software outputs an image with both the rib and clavicle structures suppressed. The rib suppression performance was evaluated on 491 images. On average, 83.06% (±6.59%) of the rib structures on a standard chest image were suppressed based on the comparison of computer-identified rib areas against hand-drawn rib areas, which is equivalent to about an average of one rib that is still visible on a rib-suppressed image based on a visual assessment. Reader studies were performed to evaluate reader performance in detecting lung nodules and pneumothoraces with and without a bone-suppression companion view. Results from reader studies indicated that the bone-suppression technology significantly improved radiologists’ performance in the detection of CT-confirmed possible nodules and pneumothoraces on chest radiographs. The results also showed that radiologists were more confident in making diagnoses regarding the presence or absence of an abnormality after rib-suppressed companion views were presented
We investigate morphological differences in three-dimensional (3-D) images with cellular resolution between nonmelanoma skin cancer and normal skin using Gabor domain optical coherence microscopy. As a result, we show for the first time cellular optical coherence images of 3-D features differentiating cancerous skin from normal skin. In addition, in vivo volumetric images of normal skin from different anatomic locations are shown and compared.
This paper proposes a method for false-positive reduction in mammography computer aided detection (CAD) systems by
detecting a linear structure (LS) in individual microcalcification (MCC) cluster candidates, which primarily involves
three steps. First, it applies a modified RANSAC algorithm to a region of interest (ROI) that encloses an MCC cluster
candidate to find LS. Second, a peak-to-peak ratio of two orthogonal integral-curves (named the RANSAC feature) is
computed based on the results from the first step. Last, the computed RANSAC feature is, together with other MCC
cancer features, used in a neural network for MCC classification, results of which are compared with the classification
without the RANSAC feature. One thousand (1000) cases were used in training the classifiers, 671 cases were used in
testing. The comparison shows that there is a significant improvement in terms of the reduction of linear structure
associated false-positives readings (up to about 40% FP reduction).
Using data from a clinical trial of a commercial CAD system for lung cancer detection we separately analyzed the location, if any, selected on each film by 15 radiologists as they interpreted chest radiographs, 160 of which did not contain cancers. On the cancer-free cases, the radiologists showed statistically significant difference in decisions while using the CAD (p-value 0.002). Average specificity without computer assistance was 78%, and with computer assistance 73%. In a clinical trial with CAD for lung cancer detection there are multiple machine false positives. On chest radiographs of older current or former smokers, there are many scars that can appear like cancer to the interpreting radiologists. We are reporting on the radiologists' false positives and on the effect of machine false positive detections on observer performance on cancer-free cases. The only difference between radiologists occurred when they changed their initial true negative decision to false positive (p-value less than 0.0001), average confidence level increased, on the scale from 0.0 to 100.0, from 16.9 (high confidence of non-cancer) to 53.5 (moderate confidence cancer was present). We are reporting on the consistency of misinterpretation by multiple radiologists when they interpret cancer-free radiographs of smokers in the absence of CAD prompts. When multiple radiologists selected the same false positive location, there was usually a definite abnormality that triggered this response. The CAD identifies areas that are of sufficient concern for cancer that the radiologists will switch from a correct decision of no cancer to mark a false positive, previously overlooked, but suspicious appearing cancer-free area; one that has often been marked by another radiologist without the use of the CAD prompt. This work has implications on what should be accepted as ground truth in ROC studies: One might ask, "What a false positive response means?" when the finding, clinically, looks like cancer-it just isn’t cancer, based on long-term follow-up or histology.
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