title: Computer-aided focal liver lesion detection.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  Our aim is to develop an automatic method which can detect diverse focal liver lesions (FLLs) in 3D CT volumes.
  
  
  METHODS
  A hybrid generative-discriminative framework is proposed. It first uses a generative model to describe non-lesion components and then identifies all candidate FLLs within a 3D liver volume by eliminating non-lesion components. It subsequently uses a discriminative approach to suppress false positives with the advantage of tumoroid, a novel measurement combining three shape features spherical symmetry, compactness and size.
  
  
  RESULTS
  This method was tested on 71 abdominal CT datasets (5,854 slices from 61 patients, with 261 FLLs covering six pathological types) and evaluated using the free-response receiver operating characteristic (FROC) curves. Overall, it achieved a true positive rate of 90 % with one false positive per liver. It degenerated gently with the decrease in lesion sizes to 30 ml. It achieved a true-positive rate of 36 % when tested on the lesions less than 4 ml. The average computing time of the lesion detection is 4 min and 28 s per CT volume on a PC with 2.67 GHz CPU and 4.0 GB RAM.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The proposed method is comparable to the radiologists' visual investigation in terms of efficiency. The tool has great potential to reduce radiologists' burden in going through thousands of images routinely.
authors.affiliation: Singapore Bioimaging Consortium, Agency for Science, Technology and Research, 30 Biopolis Street, #07-01, Matrix, 138671 , Singapore, Singapore. yanling.chi@gmail.com
authors.forename: Yanling
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Chi
authors.forename: Jiayin
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Zhou
authors.forename: Sudhakar K
authors.initials: SK
authors.lastname: Venkatesh
authors.forename: Su
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Huang
authors.forename: Qi
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Tian
authors.forename: Tiffany
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Hennedige
authors.forename: Jimin
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Liu
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D008099:Liver / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging*; D008107:Liver Diseases / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging*; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D061330:Multidetector Computed Tomography / Q000379:methods*; D012372:ROC Curve; D011857:Radiographic Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012189:Retrospective Studies
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