Lung cancer is one of the diseases contributing to the rise in mortality rate in the world and early detection could help increase the chances of survival of the people. Diagnosis of the disease at an initial stage has increased the chance of survival from 14% to 49% over the last five years. Computed Tomography is effective to identify the presence of lung cancer. Coupled with various image processing algorithms, it enables in early diagnosis of this disease. The main aim of this paper is to elaborate on the various image processing techniques such as image enhancement, segmentation and feature extraction used for lung cancer detection. The image processing algorithms were tested using the MATLAB image processing toolbox.

Keywords : Cancer Detection; Image processing; Feature extraction; Enhancement; Watershed; Masking.