Multi-level tree analysis of pulmonary artery/vein trees in non-contrast CT images

Zhiyun Gao; Randall W. Grout; Eric A. Hoffman; Punam K. Saha

doi:10.1117/12.911471

14 February 2012 Multi-level tree analysis of pulmonary artery/vein trees in non-contrast CT images

Zhiyun Gao, Randall W. Grout, Eric A. Hoffman, Punam K. Saha

Proceedings Volume 8314, Medical Imaging 2012: Image Processing; 83142W (2012) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.911471
Event: SPIE Medical Imaging, 2012, San Diego, California, United States

Abstract

Diseases like pulmonary embolism and pulmonary hypertension are associated with vascular dystrophy. Identifying such pulmonary artery/vein (A/V) tree dystrophy in terms of quantitative measures via CT imaging significantly facilitates early detection of disease or a treatment monitoring process. A tree structure, consisting of nodes and connected arcs, linked to the volumetric representation allows multi-level geometric and volumetric analysis of A/V trees. Here, a new theory and method is presented to generate multi-level A/V tree representation of volumetric data and to compute quantitative measures of A/V tree geometry and topology at various tree hierarchies. The new method is primarily designed on arc skeleton computation followed by a tree construction based topologic and geometric analysis of the skeleton. The method starts with a volumetric A/V representation as input and generates its topologic and multi-level volumetric tree representations long with different multi-level morphometric measures. A new recursive merging and pruning algorithms are introduced to detect bad junctions and noisy branches often associated with digital geometric and topologic analysis. Also, a new notion of shortest axial path is introduced to improve the skeletal arc joining two junctions. The accuracy of the multi-level tree analysis algorithm has been evaluated using computer generated phantoms and pulmonary CT images of a pig vessel cast phantom while the reproducibility of method is evaluated using multi-user A/V separation of in vivo contrast-enhanced CT images of a pig lung at different respiratory volumes.

Citation Download Citation

Zhiyun Gao, Randall W. Grout, Eric A. Hoffman, and Punam K. Saha "Multi-level tree analysis of pulmonary artery/vein trees in non-contrast CT images", Proc. SPIE 8314, Medical Imaging 2012: Image Processing, 83142W (14 February 2012); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.911471

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