摘要

Combined features of solitary pulmonary nodules (SPNs) in both PET and CT images were considered to develop a method for solving SPNs detection problems. A hierarchical template matching algorithm and an improved watershed algorithm were used to detect the suspicious area in PET and CT images respectively. The developed method was applied to SPNs diagnoses to show that the method outperforms these methods based on CT features only or PET features only in terms of the false-positive rate reduction while guaranteeing the true-positive rate. Therefore, the results show the validity of the method in clinical SPNs segmentation.