Performance Evaluation of Contrast Enhancement Techniques in Computed Tomography of Lung Images

Death rates due to cancer are elevating day by day. Millions of people across the world are affected due to this deadly disease. US population suffers from lung cancer at a higher rate in recent years. Computed tomography is a reliable diagnostic methods for lung cancer. In this method the radiologist face challenges to accurately identify the malignant lung nodules. Due to a large number of cases often radiologists missed the malignant nodules in images. Recently, many research works carried out in the areas of automated lung nodule detection have shown remarkable improvement in the radiologist performance. It is necessary to take into consideration the quality of images in the detection of pulmonary nodules. This has inspired us to analyze the preprocessing stage that comprises of a contrast enhancement stage of lung images. In this regard, the performance of different contrast enhancement methods is compared for lung image available in the public LIDC database using standard contrast evaluation metrics.