A Hybrid Approach for 3D Lung Segmentation in CT Images Using Active Contour and Morphological Operation

Abstract

Lung segmentation is the initial step for detection and diagnosis for lung-related abnormalities and disease. In CAD system for lung cancer, this step traces the boundary for the pulmonary region from thorax in CT images. It decreases the overhead for a further step in CAD system by reducing the space for finding the ROIs. The major issue and challenging task for the segmentation is the inclusion of juxtapleural nodules in the segmented lungs. The chapter attempts 3D lung segmentation of CT images using active contour and morphological operations. The major steps in the proposed approach contain: preprocessing through various techniques, Otsu's thresholding for the binarizing the image; morphological operations are applied for elimination of undesired region and, finally, active contour for the segmentation of the lungs in 3D. For experiment, 10 subjects are taken from the public dataset of LIDC-IDRI. The proposed method achieved accuracies 0.979 Jaccard's similarity index value, 0.989 Dice similarity coefficient, and 0.073 volume overlap error when compared to ground truth.