Microstructure analysis of the secondary pulmonary lobules by 3D synchrotron radiation CT

Y. Fukuoka; Y. Kawata; N. Niki; K. Umetani; Y. Nakano; H. Ohmatsu; N. Moriyama; H. Itoh

doi:10.1117/12.2043454

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18 March 2014 Microstructure analysis of the secondary pulmonary lobules by 3D synchrotron radiation CT

Y. Fukuoka, Y. Kawata, N. Niki, K. Umetani, Y. Nakano, H. Ohmatsu, N. Moriyama, H. Itoh

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Proceedings Volume 9035, Medical Imaging 2014: Computer-Aided Diagnosis; 90352F (2014) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2043454
Event: SPIE Medical Imaging, 2014, San Diego, California, United States

Abstract

Recognition of abnormalities related to the lobular anatomy has become increasingly important in the diagnosis and differential diagnosis of lung abnormalities at clinical routines of CT examinations. This paper aims a 3-D microstructural analysis of the pulmonary acinus with isotropic spatial resolution in the range of several micrometers by using micro CT. Previously, we demonstrated the ability of synchrotron radiation micro CT (SRμCT) using offset scan mode in microstructural analysis of the whole part of the secondary pulmonary lobule. In this paper, we present a semiautomatic method to segment the acinar and subacinar airspaces from the secondary pulmonary lobule and to track small vessels running inside alveolar walls in human acinus imaged by the SRμCT. The method beains with and segmentation of the tissues such as pleural surface, interlobular septa, alveola wall, or vessel using a threshold technique and 3-D connected component analysis. 3-D air space are then conustructed separated by tissues and represented branching patterns of airways and airspaces distal to the terminal bronchiole. A graph-partitioning approach isolated acini whose stems are interactively defined as the terminal bronchiole in the secondary pulmonary lobule. Finally, we performed vessel tracking using a non-linear sate space which captures both smoothness of the trajectories and intensity coherence along vessel orientations. Results demonstrate that the proposed method can extract several acinar airspaces from the 3-D SRμCT image of secondary pulmonary lobule and that the extracted acinar airspace enable an accurate quantitative description of the anatomy of the human acinus for interpretation of the basic unit of pulmonary structure and function.

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Y. Fukuoka, Y. Kawata, N. Niki, K. Umetani, Y. Nakano, H. Ohmatsu, N. Moriyama, and H. Itoh "Microstructure analysis of the secondary pulmonary lobules by 3D synchrotron radiation CT", Proc. SPIE 9035, Medical Imaging 2014: Computer-Aided Diagnosis, 90352F (18 March 2014); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2043454

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