• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.1104-1120
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• 2020

The chest X-rays are a common way to diagnose lung cancer or pneumonia. In particular, the finding of a lung nodule is the most important problem in the early detection of lung cancer. Recently, a lot of automatic diagnosis algorithms have been studied to find the lung nodules missed by doctors. The algorithms are typically based on segmentation network like U-Net. However, the occurrence of false positives that similar to lung nodules present outside the lungs can severely degrade performance. In this study, we propose a multi-task learning method that simultaneously learns the lung region and nodule-labeled data based on the prior knowledge that lung nodules exist only in the lung. The proposed method significantly reduces false positives outside the lung and improves the recognition rate of lung nodules to 83.8 F1 score compared to 66.6 F1 score of single task learning with U-net model. The experimental results on the JSRT public dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method compared with other baseline methods.

• IEMEK Journal of Embedded Systems and Applications
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.265-272
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• 2022

As the risk of lung cancer has increased, early-stage detection and treatment of cancers have received a lot of attention. Among various medical imaging approaches, computer tomography (CT) has been widely utilized to examine the size and growth rate of lung nodules. However, the process of manual examination is a time-consuming task, and it causes physical and mental fatigue for medical professionals. Recently, many computer-aided diagnostic methods have been proposed to reduce the workload of medical professionals. In recent studies, encoder-decoder architectures have shown reliable performances in medical image segmentation, and it is adopted to predict lesion candidates. However, localizing nodules in lung CT images is a challenging problem due to the extremely small sizes and unstructured shapes of nodules. To solve these problems, we utilize atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) to minimize the loss of information for a general U-Net baseline model to extract rich representations from various receptive fields. Moreover, we propose mixed-up attention mechanism of reverse, boundary and convolutional block attention module (CBAM) to improve the accuracy of segmentation small scale of various shapes. The performance of the proposed model is compared with several previous attention mechanisms on the LIDC-IDRI dataset, and experimental results demonstrate that reverse, boundary, and CBAM (RB-CBAM) are effective in the segmentation of small nodules.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.468-475
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• 2020

In this paper, we proposed a three-dimensional visualization system for medical images in augmented reality based on deep learning. In the proposed system, the artificial neural network model performed fully automatic segmentation of the region of lung and pulmonary nodule from chest CT images. After applying the three-dimensional volume rendering method to the segmented images, it was visualized in augmented reality devices. As a result of the experiment, when nodules were present in the region of lung, it could be easily distinguished with the naked eye. Also, the location and shape of the lesions were intuitively confirmed. The evaluation was accomplished by comparing automated segmentation results of the test dataset to the manual segmented image. Through the evaluation of the segmentation model, we obtained the region of lung DSC (Dice Similarity Coefficient) of 98.77%, precision of 98.45%, recall of 99.10%. And the region of pulmonary nodule DSC of 91.88%, precision of 93.05%, recall of 90.94%. If this proposed system will be applied in medical fields such as medical practice and medical education, it is expected that it can contribute to custom organ modeling, lesion analysis, and surgical education and training of patients.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.18 no.5
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• pp.702-712
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• 2013

In this paper, we proposed an algorithm that extracts the airway and lung without loss of information in spite of the pulmonary vessel and nodules of the chest wall in the chest CT images. We use a mask image in order to improve the performance and to save processing time of airway and lung segmentation. In the second step, by converting left and right lungs to binary image using the morphological information, we have removed the solitary pulmonary nodule to identify the value of the threshold lung and the chest wall. The last step is to connect the outer shell of the lung with cubic Spline interpolation by adding the perfect pixel and computing the distance of the removed part. Experimental results using Matlab verified that the proposed method could overcome the drawbacks of the conventional methods.