ABSTRACT
According to the GLOBOCAN 2008 survey carried out by the World Health Organization and International Agency for Research on Cancer [13], lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide, with an estimated death toll in 2004 of more than 1.4 million and with over 1.6 million new cases diagnosed. The overall survival rate of a lung cancer patient is about 14% [3,16], a Žgure that can be improved to anywhere between 40% and 70% for early-stage patients that undergo a lung resection (removal of part of or a whole lung) [3,14,28]. The key to this extended survival rate is early detection of the cancer, motivating the development of techniques to aid radiologists in these detection tasks.
