3D texture analysis of solitary pulmonary nodules using co-occurrence matrix from volumetric lung CT images

Abstract

In this paper we have investigated a new approach for texture features extraction using co-occurrence matrix from volumetric lung CT image. Traditionally texture analysis is performed in 2D and is suitable for images collected from 2D imaging modality. The use of 3D imaging modalities provide the scope of texture analysis from 3D object and 3D texture feature are more realistic to represent 3D object. In this work, Haralick's texture features are extended in 3D and computed from volumetric data considering 26 neighbors. The optimal texture features to characterize the internal structure of Solitary Pulmonary Nodules (SPN) are selected based on area under curve (AUC) values of ROC curve and p values from 2-tailed Student's t-test. The selected texture feature in 3D to represent SPN can be used in efficient Computer Aided Diagnostic (CAD) design plays an important role in fast and accurate lung cancer screening. The reduced number of input features to the CAD system will decrease the computational time and classification errors caused by irrelevant features. In the present work, SPN are classified from Ground Glass Nodule (GGN) using Artificial Neural Network (ANN) classifier considering top five 3D texture features and top five 2D texture features separately. The classification is performed on 92 SPN and 25 GGN from Imaging Database Resources Initiative (IDRI) public database and classification accuracy using 3D texture features and 2D texture features provide 97.17% and 89.1% respectively.