Improvement of Automated Lymph Node Detection Method by Modifying Blob-like Structure Enhancement Processing in 3D Abdominal X-ray CT Images

Abstract

In this paper, we describe abdominal lymph node detection methods intended to assist in preoperative diagnosis before surgery for colon or stomach cancer. These methods are able to provide assistance in determining the area to be resected at the time of preoperative diagnosis and to display the detected lymph nodes during the surgical procedure by detecting the lymph nodes in which there is a high likelihood of metastasis. When the previous method is employed, many false positives are also detected. We have therefore improved the blob-like structure enhancement processing for detecting lymph nodes and the false positive reduction procedure based on feature analysis for increasing the detection accuracy. The improved method was applied to 28 abdominal CT images, and the results showed that it was possible to detect 65 of 95 lymph nodes with about 13 false positives per case.