Fujitsu has developed a technology to accurately align nodules in a patient's CT images taken over time. A practice which, although reasonably achievable in regions of the body with many blood vessels, can be difficult in regions where blood vessels are scarce.

Mapping nodules, and their movement, is critical for monitoring and screening for cancer. Matching older images to the new one can be a tedious process as physicians try to account for movement from breathing, or heartbeats. It is also a practice with little wiggle room for error. For results to be meaningful they need to obtain an error margin below 2.5 mm.

The conventional approach achieves those results in 30 percent of cases whereas in tests, Fujitsu's new technology has been shown to accomplish this in 80 percent of attempts.
The technology works by aligning points over a larger part of the body that has fewer blood vessels, essentially mapping out a greater mass of the body in a way that is not compromised by a multitude of "feature points," or visual landmarks that may shift over time for various reasons.

Researchers will present details on the technology at the Pattern Recognition and Media Understanding (PRMU) Conference on February 19th at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan. The company hopes to commercialize the technology this year.

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