A Clinical Decision-Support System Based on Three-Stage Integrated Image Analysis for Diagnosing Lung Disease

Thoracic computed tomography (CT) technology has been used for lung cancer screening in high-risk populations, and this technique is highly effective in the identification of early lung cancer. With the rapid development of intelligent image analysis in the field of medical science and technology, many researchers have proposed computer-aided automatic diagnosis methods for facilitating medical experts in detecting lung nodules. This paper proposes an advanced clinical decision-support system for analyzing chest CT images of lung disease. Three advanced methods are utilized in the proposed system: the three-stage automated segmentation method (TSASM), the discrete wavelet packets transform (DWPT) with singular value decomposition (SVD), and the algorithms of the rough set theory, which comprise a classification-based method. Two collected medical CT image datasets were prepared to evaluate the proposed system. The CT image datasets were labeled (nodule, non-nodule, or inflammation) by experienced radiologists from a regional teaching hospital. According to the results, the proposed system outperforms other classification methods (trees, naïve Bayes, multilayer perception, and sequential minimal optimization) in terms of classification accuracy and can be employed as a clinical decision-support system for diagnosing lung disease.