Segmentation of Pulmonary Nodules in CT Images Using the Sliding Band Filter

Abstract

This paper proposes a conventional approach for pulmonary nodule segmentation, that uses the Sliding Band Filter to estimate the center of the nodule, and consequently the filter’s support points, matching the initial border coordinates. This preliminary segmentation is then refined to try to include mainly the nodular area, and no other regions (e.g. vessels and pleural wall). The algorithm was tested on 2653 nodules from the LIDC database and achieved a Dice score of 0.663, yielding similar results to the ground truth reference, and thus being a promising tool to promote early lung cancer screening and improve nodule characterization. © 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.