An Improved Automatic Computer Aided Tube Detection and Labeling System on Chest Radiographs

Tubes like Endotracheal (ET) tube used to maintain patient's airway and the Nasogastric (NG) tube used to feed the patient and drain contents of the stomach are very commonly used in Intensive Care Units (ICU). The placement of these tubes is critical for their proper functioning and improper tube placement can even be fatal. Bedside chest radiographs are considered the quickest and safest method to check the placement of these tubes. Tertiary ICU's typically generate over 250 chest radiographs per day to confirm tube placement. This paper develops a new fully automatic prototype computer-aided detection (CAD) system for tube detection on bedside chest radiographs. The CAD system is based on generating tube candidates from multiple seed points and using a voting scheme to identify the tube(s). The CAD algorithm is designed as a 5 stage process: Preprocessing (removing borders, histogram equalization, anisotropic filtering), Anatomy Segmentation (to identify neck, esophagus, and abdomen ROI's), Seed Generation, Region Growing and Tube Selection. The preliminary evaluation was carried out on 64 cases. The prototype CAD system was able to detect ET tubes with a True Positive Rate of 0.93 and False Positive Rate of 0.02/image and NG tubes with a True Positive Rate of 0.84 and False Positive Rate of 0.02/image respectively. The results from the prototype system show that it is feasible to automatically detect both tubes on chest radiographs, with the potential to significantly speed the delivery of imaging services while maintaining high accuracy.