Title
Pulmonary lobe segmentation using the thin plate spline (TPS) with the help of the fissure localization areas
Abstract
Lung lobe segmentation is clinically important for disease classification, treatment and follow-up of pulmonary diseases. Diseases such as tuberculosis and silicolis typically present in specific lobes i.e. almost exclusively the upper ones. However, the fissures separating different lobes are often difficult to detect because of their variable shape, appearance and low contrast in computed tomography images. In addition, a substantial fraction of patients have missing or incomplete fissures. To solve this problem, several methods have been employed to interpolate incomplete or missed fissures. For example, Pu et al. used an implicit surface fitting with different radial basis functions; Ukil et al. apply fast marching methods; and Ross et al. used an interactive thin plate spline (TPS) interpolation where the user selects the points that will be used to compute the fissure interpolation via TPS. In our study, results of an automated fissure detection method based on a plate-filter as well points derived from vessels were fed into an a robust TPS interpolation that ultimately defined the lobes. To improve the selection of detected points, we statistically determined the areas where fissures are localized from 19 data-sets. These areas were also used to constrain TPS fitting so it reflected the expected shape and orientation of the fissures, hence improving result accuracy. Regions where the detection step provided low response were replaced by points derived from a distance-to-vessels map The error, defined as the Euclidian mean distance between ground truth points and the TPS fitted fissures, was computed for each dataset to validate our results. Ground truth points were defined for both exact fissure locations and approximate fissure locations (when the fissures were not clearly visible). The mean error was 5.64+/-4.83 mm for the exact ground truth points, and 10.01+/-8.23 mm for the approximate ground truth points.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1117/12.2007098
Proceedings of SPIE
Keywords
Field
DocType
lobe segmentation,fissure enhancement,thin-plate spline,clustering,surface fitting,vessel segmentation
Computer vision,Thin plate spline,Segmentation,Fast marching method,Lobe,Interpolation,Mean squared error,Ground truth,Artificial intelligence,Fissure,Physics
Conference
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
8669
0277-786X
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.36
0
10
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Benjamin Odry1337.61
pauline steininger210.36
li zhang310.70
atilla peter kiraly4479.16
alexander mahnke510.36
Sandra Sudarsky615613.04
Carol L. Novak714623.88
berhard geiger811.04
Shuping Qing971.62
hendrik ditt1010.36