A joint ROI extraction filter for computer aided lung nodule detection.

Extraction of regions of interest plays an important rule in computer aided lung nodules detection. However, because of the complex background and structure, accurate and robust extraction of ROIs in medical image still remains a problem. Aim at this problem, a two-stage operations joint filter: Hessian-LoB, is proposed. The first stage is blobs (which being taken as candidate ROIs) detection and the second stage is ROIs extraction. In the first stage, the derivatives of a Hessian matrix at multiple scales are convolved with input images to localize blobs. Then in the second stage, Laplacian of bilateral filter (LoB) is convolved with the detected blobs to extract the final ROIs. Experiments show that the proposed filter can deal with images with noise and low brightness contrast, and is effectively in ROI extraction for lung nodule detection.