Embodiments classify lung nodules by accessing a 3D radiological image of a region of tissue, the 3D image including a plurality of voxels and slices, a slice having a thickness; segmenting the nodule represented in the 3D image across contiguous slices, the nodule having a 3D volume and 3D interface, where the 3D interface includes an interface voxel; partitioning the 3D interface into a plurality of nested shells, a nested shell including a plurality of 2D slices, a 2D slice including a boundary pixel; extracting a set of intra-perinodular textural transition (Ipris) features from the 2D slices based on a normal of a boundary pixel of the 2D slices; providing the Ipris features to a machine learning classifier which computes a probability that the nodule is malignant, based, at least in part, on the set of Ipris features; and generating a classification of the nodule based on the probability.