Automatic Extraction of Gound-glass Opacities on Lung CT Images by Histogram Analysis

In recent yeas, studies on computer aided diagnosis (CAD) using image analysis on CT images have been conducted with respect to various diseases. Extracting ground-glass opacities (GGO) on lung CT images is one of such subjects, though it has not found an established method yet. If the region of ground-glass opacities is large on CT images, it can be detected without much difficulty. On the other hand, if the region is small, it is still difficult to find it exactly. In the latter case, increasing overlooking possibility cannot be avoided according to smaller size of the region. To solve this difficulty, this paper proposes an automatic technique for extracting ground-glass opacities on lung CT images employing some statistical parameters of a gray level histogram and a differential histogram. The proposed technique is applied to some lung CT images in the performed experiment. The results are shown with discussion on future work.