A Novel Method for Pulmonary Embolism Detectionin CTA Images

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new computer-aided detection (CAD) – based method to detectpulmonary embolism (PE) in computed tomography angiography images (CTAI). Since lungvessel segmentation is the main objective to provide high sensitivity in PE detection, thismethod performs accurate lung vessel segmentation. To concatenate clogged vessels due toPEs, the starting region of PEs and some reference points (RPs) are determined. These RPs aredetected according to the fixed anatomical structures. After lung vessel tree is segmented,the region, intensity, and size of PEs are used to distinguish them. We used the data setsthat have heart disease or abnormal tissues because of lung disease except PE in this work.According to the results, 428 of 450 PEs, labeled by the radiologists from 33 patients, havebeen detected. The sensitivity of the developed system is 95.1% at 14.4 false positive perdata set (FP/ds). With this performance, the proposed CAD system is found quite useful touse as a second reader by the radiologists.