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The purpose of this study was to evaluate radiologists’ performance in detecting lung nodules using chest computed tomography (CT) scans when assisted by a computer-aided detection (CAD) system with a vessel suppression function. Three radiologists participated in this preliminary observer study. The observer study was conducted on 80 CT scans including 94 nodules. The ratio of nodule-free scans to with-nodule scans was 1:1. CAD systems with (CAD-VS) and without (CAD-nVS) a vessel suppression function were developed to assist radiologists in reading chest CT scans. The radiologists read the CT scans in a two-session process, which had at least a one-month interval in between. Freeresponse receiver operating characteristic (FROC) curves and localization receiver operating characteristic (LROC) curves were utilized to analyze the nodule detection results. The CAD-VS and the CAD-nVS detected 96.8% and 93.6% of nodules, respectively, at 0.5 false positive per scan. For the observer study, the mean area under the LROC curve (LROC-AUC) for nodule detection improved from 0.877 by use of the CAD-nVS to 0.942 by use of the CAD-VS. Radiologists averagely detected 94.0% and 96.5% of nodules with the CAD-nVS and CAD-VS, respectively; average specificity increased from 71.7% to 81.7%. The CAD-VS improved radiologists’ performance for lung nodule detection, compared to the general CAD-nVS. This suggests that the CAD-VS technique is feasible to help radiologists further improve the clinical detection accuracy of lung nodules in chest CT scans.
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