Automatic extraction of ground-glass opacity shadows on CT images of the thorax by correlation between successive slices

Abstract

In general, segmentation is difficult because surrounding soft tissues and organs have similar CT values and sometimes contact with each other. We propose a new technique for automatic segmentation of lung regions and its classification for ground-glass opacity from the segmented lung regions by computer based on a set of the thorax CT images. In this paper, we segment the lung region for extraction of the region of interest employing binarization and labeling process from the inputted each slices images. The region having the largest area is regarded as the tentative lung regions. Furthermore, the ground-glass opacity is classified by correlation distribution on the slice to slice from the extracted lung region with respect to the thorax CT images. Experiment is performed employing twenty six thorax CT image sets and 96% of recognition rates were achieved. Obtained results are shown along with a discussion.