An automated lung nodule detection system for CT images using synthetic minority oversampling

Pulmonary nodules are a potential manifestation of lung cancer, and their early detection can remarkably enhance the survival rate of patients. This paper presents an automated pulmonary nodule detection algorithm for lung CT images. The algorithm utilizes a two-stage approach comprising nodule candidate detection followed by reduction of false positives. The nodule candidate detection involves thresholding, followed by morphological opening. The geometrical features at this stage are selected from properties of nodule size and compactness, and lead to reduced number of false positives. An SVM classifier is used with a radial basis function kernel. The data imbalance, due to uneven distribution of nodules and non-nodules as a result of the candidate detection stage, is proposed to be addressed by oversampling of minority class using Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique (SMOTE), and over-imposition of its misclassification penalty. Experiments were performed on 97 CT scans of a publically-available (LIDC-IDRI) database. Performance is evaluated in terms of sensitivity and false positives per scan (FP/scan). Results indicate noteworthy performance of the proposed approach (nodule detection sensitivity after 4-fold cross-validation is 92.91% with 3 FP/scan). Comparative analysis also reflects a comparable and often better performance of the proposed setup over some of the existing techniques.