Improved pulmonary embolism (PE) detection may be obtained through computer aided-diagnosis. In particular, PE detection may be accomplished through patient-level diagnosis, embolus-level detection, or a combination of the two. Patient-level diagnosis operates to quickly exclude non-PE patients and dispatch PE-patients to treatment. Embolus-level detection operates to localize individual emboli to support personalized medicine via risk stratification. Multiple instance-based learning (MIBL) classification at the patient level explores the key observation that once any TP candidate of a patient is classified as positive, the patient is identified as PE positive. That is, MIBL focuses on correct classification of patients rather than individual candidates, to effectively and rapidly distinguish between PE patients and non-PE patients.
