Lung cancer has become one of the malignant tumors with the fastest growing morbidity and mortality
bringing great threats to human health. Studies have shown that early detection of lung cancer accompanied with early treatment can improve the survival rate and prognostic conditions. Lung computed tomography (CT) images mainly include the lung parenchyma
air outside the lung parenchyma
and checking bed. Gray inhomogeneity always exists because the noise and bias field are strong in lung CT images
and the organizational structure is complex. Consequently
the lung parenchyma is difficult to effectively segmented and extracted in the field of auxiliary technology research for lung disease diagnosis. This study proposes an automatic segmentation algorithm based on superpixel refining segmentation combined with fuzzy c-means clustering to improve the accuracy of lung parenchyma segmentation. First
superpixel division is achieved
and refining segmentation is conducted on superpixel regions where an error occurs. Second
the fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm is used based on specific characteristics. Finally
the superpixel regions that share the same classification are merged
and the final segmentation results are obtained. The algorithm can use the gray and texture features of lung CT images. The spatial neighborhood information is introduced to enhance the space constraints for generating the correct superpixel classification
thereby effectively solving the problem of gray inhomogeneity. The algorithm can carry out the segmentation of lung parenchyma
remove the surrounding main blood vessels
and use morphological knowledge to remove branch blood vessels in the lungs. In clinical patients with four types of disease on the CT image data set with improved image characteristics
the lung parenchyma segmentation accuracy is increased by 0.8%. The algorithm accuracy is also increased to 99.46%. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively overcome the interference of bias field and noise during image segmentation. Therefore
this algorithm can achieve the automatic refinement of lung parenchyma segmentation in lung CT image efficiently. The results are accurate and applicative. The algorithm has good robustness
and it is a fast
accurate
and effective automatic lung parenchyma segmentation method.