X線CT像における気管・気管支の形状情報の計測

概要

論文の詳細を見る
The lung structures including airway tree, lung lobes and pulmonary segments are important information that are required by the development of computer-aided diagnosis systems. The structure of airway tree is the most important key point and provides the basic information for recognizing the lung lobe and lung segments. However, automated extraction and recognition of airway trees are difficult and the prior knowledge for supporting the extraction is expected. In this research, the distributions of angle, length, and diameter of airways in different branches were investigated using X-ray CT images from 50 patient cases. The experimental results showed that directions of each bronchial branch of airway regions in 50 CT cases distributed within a range of ±30 degrees, and the decreasing ratio of airway diameter between the child/parent bronchial branch was 0.7-0.8. These results showed that the possibility of sequentially estimating the direction and diameter of airway tree from parent bronchial branch to its child bronchial branches may be useful for extraction and recognition of the airway trees in CT images.
医用画像情報学会の論文