Tumor detection in nonstationary backgrounds

Journal Article · Thu Sep 01 04:00:00 EDT 1994 · IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers); (United States)

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1109/42.310880· OSTI ID:6861839

Stickland, R N ^[1]

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1. Univ. of Arizona, Tucson, AZ (United States)

The author introduces two detectors which are used to locate simulated tumors of fixed size in clinical gamma-ray images. The first method was conceived when it was observed that small tumors possess an identifiable signature in curvature feature space, where curvature'' is the local curvature of the image data when viewed as a relief map. Computed curvature values are mapped to a normalized significance space using a windowed t-statistic. The resulting test statistic is thresholded at a chosen level of significance to give a positive detection. Nonuniform anatomic background activity is effectively suppressed. The second detector is an adaptive prewhitening matched filter, which uses a form of preprocessing known as statistical scaling to adaptively prewhiten the background. Tests are performed using simulated Gaussian-shaped tumors superimposed on twelve clinical gamma-ray images. When the tumors to be detected are small -- less than 3 pixels in diameter - the curvature detector out-performs the matched filter in true positive/false positive tests. A mean true positive rate of 95% at one false positive per image is achieved when the local signal-to-noise ratio of the tumor-background is [>=] 2. At larger tumor sizes the best performance is displayed by a different form of matched filter, namely the statistical correlation function proposed by Pratt.

• OSTI ID: 6861839
• Journal Information: IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers); (United States), Journal Name: IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers); (United States) Vol. 13:3; ISSN 0278-0062; ISSN ITMID4
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

550601* -- Medicine-- Unsealed Radionuclides in Diagnostics
62 RADIOLOGY AND NUCLEAR MEDICINE
CAMERAS
DIAGNOSIS
DISEASES
GAMMA CAMERAS
IMAGE PROCESSING
NEOPLASMS
PERFORMANCE TESTING
PROCESSING
TESTING