Finding and Following of Honeycombing Regions in Computed Tomography Lung Images by Deep Learning

Abstract: In recent years, besides the medical treatment methods in medical field, Computer Aided Diagnosis (CAD) systems which can facilitate the decision making phase of the physician and can detect the disease at an early stage have started to be used frequently. The diagnosis of Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis (IPF) disease by using CAD systems is very important in that it can be followed by doctors and radiologists. It has become possible to diagnose and follow up the disease with the help of CAD systems by the development of high resolution computed imaging scanners and increasing size of computation power. The purpose of this project is to design a tool that will help specialists diagnose and follow up the IPF disease by identifying areas of honeycombing and ground glass patterns in High Resolution Computed Tomography (HRCT) lung images. Creating a program module that segments the lung pair and creating a self-learner deep learning model from given Computed Tomography (CT) images for the specific diseased regions thanks to doctors are the main purposes of this work. Through the created model, program module will be able to find special regions in given new CT images. In this study, the performance of lung segmentation was tested by the S{\o}rensen-Dice coefficient method and the mean performance was measured as 90.7%, testing of the created model was performed with data not used in the training stage of the CNN network, and the average performance was measured as 87.8% for healthy regions, 73.3% for ground-glass areas and 69.1% for honeycombing zones.