Contact:

Barbara Y. Croft, Ph.D.
Diagnostic Imaging Program
Telephone 301-496-9531
e-mail: bc129b@nih.gov

Objective of Project:

The intent of this initiative is to support a consortium of institutions to develop the necessary consensus and standards for a lung CT image database resource, and to construct a database of spiral CT lung images.

Description of Project:

Spiral CT of the lung is of great interest because of its potential as a screening tool for lung cancer. The specific goals of this initiative are to 1) Provide an environment to develop consensus criteria for (a) preparation and submission of cases representative of clinical practice, (b) spatial determination of reference standards for lung nodules electronically in 3D, and © common metrics and software for statistical validation of the performance of CAD methods and temporal analysis software tools; 2) Provide a common research resource to the medical imaging community to (a) permit early identification of promising software methods from the diverse pool of emerging tools, (b) stimulate the development of more advanced 3D CAD methods including temporal analysis, © accelerate research timeliness and (d) reduce the risk for diagnostic software development by academia and/or industry for lung cancer screening; and 3) Allow Internet access to the database by the broad imaging research community.