PLUG-IN MODULES ON PLUTO FOR IDENTIFYING INFLAMMATORY NODULES FROM LUNG NODULES IN CHEST X-RAY CT IMAGES

We introduce an implementation of plug-ins on PLUTO. These plug-ins discriminate inflammatory nodules from other types of nodules in chest X-ray CT images. The PLUTO is a common platform for computer-aided diagnosis systems on Microsoft Windows series and it is easy to add new functions as plug-ins. We coded two plug-ins. One of the them calculates features based on medical knowledge. The other plug-in calculates parameters to classify the type of nodules, and it also classifies nodules into inflammatory nodules and others using SVM. These plug-ins are coded using MIST library which is produced at Nagoya University, Japan. In our previous study, the MIST library was parallelized, so that we can utilize a number of CPUs to calculate features and SVM learning/classifying depending on the amount of computation. Using these plug-ins, it became easy to extract features to discriminate inflammatory nodules from other types of nodules and to change parameters for feature extraction and SVM learning/classifying with GUI interface. The accuracy of the classifying result is 100% with 78 solid nodules which contains 43 inflammatory nodules and 35 other type of nodules.