Objective: To discuss the clinical and imaging diagnostic rules of peripheral lung cancer by data mining technique, and to explore new ideas in the diagnosis of peripheral lung cancer, and to obtain early-stage technology and knowledge support of computer-aided detecting(CAD). Methods: 58 cases of peripheral lung cancer confirmed by clinical pathology were collected. The data were imported into the database after the standardization of the clinical and CT findings attributes were identified. The data was studied comparatively based on Association Rules (AR) of the knowledge discovery process and the Rough Set (RS) reduction algorithm and Genetic Algorithm(GA) of the generic data analysis tool (ROSETTA), respectively. Results: The genetic classification algorithm of ROSETTA generates 5 000 or so diagnosis rules. The RS reduction algorithm of Johnson`s Algorithm generates 51 diagnosis rules and the AR algorithm generates 123 diagnosis rules. Three data mining methods basically consider gender, age, cough, location, lobulation sign, shape, ground-glass density attributes as the main basis for the diagnosis of peripheral lung cancer. Conclusion: These diagnosis rules for peripheral lung cancer with three data mining technology is same as clinical diagnostic rules, and these rules also can be used to build the knowledge base of expert system. This study demonstrated the potential values of data mining technology in clinical imaging diagnosis and differential diagnosis.