Title
A Computational geometry approach to automated pulmonary fissure segmentation in CT examinations.
Abstract
Identification of pulmonary fissures, which form the boundaries between the lobes in the lungs, may be useful during clinical interpretation of computed tomography (CT) examinations to assess the early presence and characterization of manifestation of several lung diseases. Motivated by the unique nature of the surface shape of pulmonary fissures in 3-D space, we developed a new automated scheme using computational geometry methods to detect and segment fissures depicted on CT images. After a geometric modeling of the lung volume using the marching cubes algorithm, Laplacian smoothing is applied iteratively to enhance pulmonary fissures by depressing nonfissure structures while smoothing the surfaces of lung fissures. Next, an extended Gaussian image based procedure is used to locate the fissures in a statistical manner that approximates the fissures using a set of plane "patches." This approach has several advantages such as independence of anatomic knowledge of the lung structure except the surface shape of fissures, limited sensitivity to other lung structures, and ease of implementation. The scheme performance was evaluated by two experienced thoracic radiologists using a set of 100 images (slices) randomly selected from 10 screening CT examinations. In this preliminary evaluation 98.7% and 94.9% of scheme segmented fissure voxels are within 2 mm of the fissures marked independently by two radiologists in the testing image dataset. Using the scheme detected fissures as reference, 89.4% and 90.1% of manually marked fissure points have distance </= 2 mm to the reference suggesting a possible under-segmentation of the scheme. The case-based root mean square (rms) distances ("errors") between our scheme and the radiologist ranged from 1.48 +/-0.92 to 2.04 +/-3.88 mm. The discrepancy of fissure detection results between the automated scheme and either radiologist is smaller in this dataset than the interreader variability.
Year
DOI
Venue
2009
10.1109/TMI.2008.2010441
IEEE Trans. Med. Imaging
Keywords
Field
DocType
diagnostic radiography,computerised tomography,gaussian processes,diseases,laplacian smoothing,gaussian image-based procedure,smoothing methods,computational geometry method,image segmentation,segmentation,computed tomography,shape analysis,computational geometry,pulmonary fissure,lung,extended gaussian image (egi),computer-aided detection (cad),iterative method,marching cubes algorithm,lung structure,ct examinations,edge detection,geometric modeling,3d space,image enhancement,pulmonary fissure enhancement,interreader variability,nonfissure structures,case-based root mean square distances,iterative methods,lung diseases,medical image processing,automated pulmonary fissure segmentation,anatomic knowledge,algorithms,geometric model,marching cube,normal distribution,shape,root mean square,solid modeling
Voxel,Computer vision,Laplacian smoothing,Segmentation,Edge detection,Marching cubes,Image segmentation,Smoothing,Artificial intelligence,Mathematics,Shape analysis (digital geometry)
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
28
5
1558-254X
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
11
0.66
22
Authors
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Jiantao Pu127723.12
Joseph K. Leader2385.88
Bin Zheng313528.83
Friedrich Knollmann4271.62
Carl Fuhrman5392.57
Frank C Sciurba6514.32
David Gur712031.52