Evaluation and progression analysis of pulmonary tuberculosis from digital chest radiographs

Abstract

Pulmonary tuberculosis is one of the most common infections in the third world countries. We propose a method for automated evaluation and progression analysis of this disease by processing a sequence of digital chest radiographs. The presence of radiological features characteristic to pulmonary tuberculosis is detected within the regions of interest using suitable image processing and pattern recognition techniques. The detected features are then quantified to evaluate the extent of the disease. The measures are evaluated for a sequence of radiographs of a patient and are normalized with respect to rib size measures. Temporal changes in these normalized measures indicate the progression of the disease during the period in which the sequence of radiographs is obtained. The details of the proposed technique and results of analysis of a number of tuberculous patients are given in the paper.