A computer aided diagnostic system and automated method diagnose lung cancer through modeling and analyzing the visual appearance of pulmonary nodules. A learned appearance model used in such analysis describes the appearance of pulmonary nodules in terms of voxel-wise conditional Gibbs energies for a generic rotation and translation invariant second-order Markov-Gibbs random field (MGRF) model of malignant nodules with analytically estimated characteristic voxel neighborhoods and potentials.
Computer aided diagnostic system incorporating appearance analysis for diagnosing malignant lung nodules