creator Agam, Gad creator Wu, Changhua A method for improving a thoracic diagnostic image for the detection of nodules. Non-lung regions are removed from the diagnostic image to provide a lung image. Vessels and vessel junctions of the lung(s) in the lung image are enhanced according to a first-order partial derivative of each of a plurality of voxels of the lung image. A vessel tree representation is constructed from the enhanced vessels and vessel junctions. The vessel tree representation can be subtracted from the lung image to enhance the visibility of nodules in the lung(s). Submitted by Aric Ahrens (ahrens@iit.edu) on 2012-03-22T16:16:38Z No. of bitstreams: 1 7783092.pdf: 344875 bytes, checksum: 3e696cdf8df150820423ba20cec0e934 (MD5) Made available in DSpace on 2012-03-22T16:16:38Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 7783092.pdf: 344875 bytes, checksum: 3e696cdf8df150820423ba20cec0e934 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2010-08-24 Illinois Institute of Technology 2012-03-20 2010-08-24 7,783,092 http://hdl.handle.net/10560/2678 en United States Patent Patent reformatted digital application/pdf No Copyright - United States http://rightsstatements.org/page/NoC-US/1.0/ Open Access