Title
Pulmonary lobe segmentation in CT examinations using implicit surface fitting.
Abstract
Lobe identification in computed tomography (CT) examinations is often an important consideration during the diagnostic process as well as during treatment planning because of their relative independence of each other in terms of anatomy and function. In this paper, we present a new automated scheme for segmenting lung lobes depicted on 3-D CT examinations. The unique characteristic of this scheme is the representation of fissures in the form of implicit functions using Radial Basis Functions (RBFs), capable of seamlessly interpolating "holes" in the detected fissures and smoothly extrapolating the fissure surfaces to the lung boundaries resulting in a "natural" segmentation of lung lobes. A previously developed statistically based approach is used to detect pulmonary fissures and the constraint points for implicit surface fitting are selected from detected fissure surfaces in a greedy manner to improve fitting efficiency. In a preliminary assessment study, lobe segmentation results of 65 chest CT examinations, five of which were reconstructed with three section thicknesses of 0.625 mm, 1.25 mm, and 2.5 mm, were subjectively and independently evaluated by two experienced chest radiologists using a five category rating scale (i.e., excellent, good, fair, poor, and unacceptable). Thirty-three of 65 examinations (50.8%) with a section thickness of 0.625 mm were rated as either "excellent" or "good" by both radiologists and only one case (1.5%) was rated by both radiologists as "poor" or "unacceptable." Comparable performance was obtained with a slice thickness of 1.25 mm, but substantial performance deterioration occurred in examinations with a section thickness of 2.5 mm. The advantages of this scheme are its full automation, relative insensitivity to fissure completeness, and ease of implementation.
Year
DOI
Venue
2009
10.1109/TMI.2009.2027117
IEEE Trans. Med. Imaging
Keywords
Field
DocType
radial basis function (rbf),radial basis function networks,diagnostic radiography,computerised tomography,computed tomography (ct),radial basis functions,lobe segmentation,pulmonary lobe segmentation,image segmentation,computed tomography,implicit surface fitting,image reconstruction,ct examinations,radiology,computer-aided diagnosis,medical image processing,rating scale,anatomy,algorithms,surface reconstruction,treatment planning,radial basis function,artificial intelligence
Iterative reconstruction,Computer vision,Segmentation,Computer-aided diagnosis,Lobe,Radiation treatment planning,Image segmentation,Artificial intelligence,Radiology,Fissure,Mathematics,Radiographic Image Enhancement
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
28
12
1558-254X
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
16
0.96
21
Authors
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Jiantao Pu127723.12
Bin Zheng213528.83
Joseph K. Leader3385.88
Carl Fuhrman4392.57
Friedrich Knollmann5271.62
Amy Klym6160.96
David Gur712031.52