CNNcon: A Quantitative Imaging Tool for Lung CT Image Feature Analysis

BackgroundLung CT scans are widely used for lung cancer screening and diagnosis. Current research focuses on quantitative analytics (radiomics) to improve screening and detection accuracy. However there are very limited numbers of portable software tools for automatic lung CT image analysis.\n\nResultsHere we build a Docker container, CNNcon, as a quantitative imaging tool for analyzing lung CT image features. CNNcon is developed from our recently published algorithm for nodule analysis, based on convolutional neural networks (CNN). When provided with a list of the centroid coordinates of regions of interest (ROI) in a volumetric CT study containing potential lung nodules, CNNcon can automatically generate highly accurate malignancy prediction of each ROI. CNNcon can also generate a vector of image features of each ROI, to facilitate further analyses by combining image features and other clinical features. As a Docker container, CNNcon is portable to various computer systems, convenient to install, and easy to use. CNNcon was tested on different computer systems and generated identical results.\n\nConclusionsWe anticipate that CNNcon will be a useful tool and broadly acceptable to the research community interested in quantitative image analysis.\n\nAvailabilityCNNcon and document are publicly available and can be downloaded from the website: http://bioinformatics.astate.edu/CNN-Container/