Transactions on Mass-Data Analysis of Images and Signals (ISSN:1868-6451)
Volume 1 - Number 1 - September 2009 - Pages 27-37
Chest X-Ray Based Tumor Growth Assessment for Lung Tumor Diagnosis
X. Jiang1, J. Hsu2, K. Rothaus1, M. Menning1, and Y.-F. Chen3
1 Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Münster, Germany
2 Department of Internal Medicine, Taichung Hospital, Taiwan
3 Department of Health Services Administration, China Medical University, Taiwan
Abstract
Among the benign lung tumors, some might be caused by inflammation, which may be cured by prescribing antibiotics. In these cases further tracking is recommended. Typically, the patient is asked to come back to have more visits every 2 or 3 months by taking CT examinations so that the physician can check if the tumor keeps growing or has the tendency to subside. In addition to the high costs of CT examinations, this practice bears substantial danger of changing the benign lung tissue into malignant due to the high exposure dose of X-ray from CT. In this work we propose a framework of chest X-ray based tumor growth assessment to alleviate both the safety and cost drawbacks of current practice. After introducing the framework we describe the details of our prototype implementation. Some preliminary results are shown to prove the usefulness and potential application of the proposed concept.