Adaptive Model Based Pulmonary Artery Segmentation in 3D Chest CT

The extraction and analysis of the pulmonary artery in computed tomography (CT) of the chest can be an important, but time-consuming step for the diagnosis and treatment of lung disease, in particular in non-contrast data, where the pulmonary artery has low contrast and frequently merges with adjacent tissue of similar intensity. We here present a new method for the automatic segmentation of the pulmonary artery based on a novel adaptive model, Hough and Euclidean distance transforms, and spline fitting, which works equally well on non-contrast and contrast enhanced data. An evaluation on 40 patient data sets and a comparison to manual segmentations in terms of Jaccard index, sensitivity, specificity, and minimum mean distance shows its overall robustness.     «

The extraction and analysis of the pulmonary artery in computed tomography (CT) of the chest can be an important, but time-consuming step for the diagnosis and treatment of lung disease, in particular in non-contrast data, where the pulmonary artery has low contrast and frequently merges with adjacent tissue of similar intensity. We here present a new method for the automatic segmentation of the pulmonary artery based on a novel adaptive model, Hough and Euclidean distance transforms, and spline...     »