Efficient Pre-Processing and Segmentation for Lung Cancer Detection Using Fused CT Images

Over the last two decades, radiologists have been using multi-view images to detect tumors. Computer Tomography (CT) imaging is considered as one of the reliable imaging techniques. Many medical-image-processing techniques have been developed to diagnoses lung cancer at early or later stages through CT images; however, it is still a big challenge to improve the accuracy and sensitivity of the algorithms. In this paper, we propose an algorithm based on image fusion for lung segmentation to optimize lung cancer diagnosis. The image fusion technique was developed through Laplacian Pyramid (LP) decomposition along with Adaptive Sparse Representation (ASR). The suggested fusion technique fragments medical images into different sizes using the LP. After that, the LP is used to fuse the four decomposed layers. For the evaluation purposes of the proposed technique, the Lungs Image Database Consortium and Image Database Resource Initiative (LIDC-IDRI) was used. The results showed that the Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) index of our proposed method was 0.9929, which is better than recently published results. Furthermore, the values of other evaluation parameters such as the sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy were 89%, 98% and 99%, respectively, which are also competitive with the recently published results.