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Illustration of the obstacles in computerized lung segmentation using examples.

ABSTRACT: Automated lung volume segmentation is often a preprocessing step in quantitative lung computed tomography (CT) image analysis. The objective of this study is to identify the obstacles in computerized lung volume segmentation and illustrate those explicitly using real examples. Awareness of these "difficult" cases may be helpful for the development of a robust and consistent lung segmentation algorithm.We collected a large diverse dataset consisting of 2768 chest CT examinations acquired on 2292 subjects from various sources. These examinations cover a wide range of diseases, including lung cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, human immunodeficiency virus, pulmonary embolism, pneumonia, asthma, and interstitial lung disease (ILD). The CT acquisition protocols, including dose, scanners, and reconstruction kernels, vary significantly. After the application of a "neutral" thresholding-based approach to the collected CT examinations in a batch manner, the failed cases were subjectively identified and classified into different subgroups.Totally, 121 failed examinations are identified, corresponding to a failure ratio of 4.4%. These failed cases are summarized as 11 different subgroups, which is further classified into 3 broad categories: (1) failure caused by diseases, (2) failure caused by anatomy variability, and (3) failure caused by external factors. The failure percentages in these categories are 62.0%, 32.2%, and 5.8%, respectively.The presence of specific lung diseases (e.g., pulmonary nodules, ILD, and pneumonia) is the primary issue in computerized lung segmentation. The segmentation failures caused by external factors and anatomy variety are relatively low but unavoidable in practice. It is desirable to develop robust schemes to handle these issues in a single pass when a large number of CT examinations need to be analyzed.

SUBMITTER: Meng X

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3416879 | biostudies-other | 2012 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other

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Project description:To aid a consistent segmentation of pulmonary nodules, the authors describe a novel computerized scheme that utilizes a freehand sketching technique and an improved break-and-repair strategy.This developed scheme consists of two primary parts. The first part is freehand sketch analysis, where the freehand sketching not only serves a natural way of specifying the location of a nodule, but also provides a mechanism for inferring adaptive information (e.g., the mass center, the density, and the size) in regard to the nodule. The second part is an improved break-and-repair strategy. The improvement avoids the time-consuming ray-triangle intersections using spherical bins and replaces the original global implicit surface reconstruction with a local implicit surface fitting and blending scheme. The performance of this scheme, including accuracy and consistence, was assessed using 50 CT examinations in the Lung Image Database Consortium (LIDC). For each of these examinations, a single nodule was selected under the aid of a publically available tool to assure these nodules were diverse in size, location, and density. Two radiologists were asked to use the developed tool to segment these nodules twice at different times (at least three months apart). A Hausdorff distance based method was used to assess the discrepancies (agreements) between the computerized results and the results by the four radiologists in the LIDC as well as the inter- and intrareader agreements in freehand sketching.The maximum and mean discrepancies in boundary outlines between the computerized scheme and the radiologists were 2.73 ± 1.32 mm and 1.01 ± 0.47 mm, respectively. When the nodules were classified (binned) into different size ranges, the maximum errors ranged from 1.91 to 4.13 mm; but smaller nodules had larger percentage discrepancies in term of size. Under the aid of the developed scheme, the inter- and intrareader variability in averaged maximum discrepancy across all types of pulmonary nodules were consistently smaller than 0.15 ± 0.07 mm. The computational cost in time of segmenting a pulmonary nodule ranged from 0.4 to 2.3 s with an average of 1.1 s for a typical desktop computer.The experiments showed that this scheme could achieve a reasonable performance in nodule segmentation and demonstrated the merits of incorporating freehand sketching into pulmonary nodule segmentation.

Project description:PurposeIn our conventional image registration workflow, the four-dimensional (4D) CBCT was directly registered to the reference helical CT (HCT) using a dual registration approach within the Elekta XVI software. In this study, we proposed a new HCT-CBCT auto-registration strategy using a previously registered CBCT (CBCTpre) as the reference image and tested its clinical feasibility.MethodsFrom a previous CBCT session, the registered average 4D CBCT was selected as CBCTpre and the HCT-CBCTpre registration vector from the clinician's manual registration result was recorded. In the new CBCT session, auto-registration was performed between the new average 4D CBCT (CBCTtx) and CBCTpre (CBCTpre-CBCTtx). The overall HCT-CBCTtx registration result was then derived by combing the results from two registrations (i.e., HCT-CBCTpre + CBCTpre-CBCTtx). The results from the proposed method were compared with clinician's manually adjusted HCT-CBCTtx registration results ("ground truth") to evaluate its accuracy using a test dataset consisting of 32 challenging registration cases.ResultsThe uncertainty of the proposed auto-registration method was -0.1 ± 0.5, 0.1 ± 1.0, and -0.1 ± 0.7 mm in three translational directions (lateral, longitudinal, and vertical) and 0.0° ± 0.9°, 0.3° ± 0.9°, and 0.4° ± 0.7° in three rotation directions, respectively. Two patients (6.3%) had translational uncertainty > 2 mm (max = 3.1 mm) and both occurred in the longitudinal direction. Meanwhile, the uncertainty of the conventional direct HCT-CBCTtx auto-registration was -0.4 ± 2.6, -0.2 ± 7.4, -1.4 ± 3.6 mm for translations and -0.3° ± 1.2°, 0.0° ± 1.6°, and 0.1 ± 1.1° for rotations. Eleven patients (34.4%) had translation uncertainty > 2 mm (max = 26.2 mm) in at least one direction. Accuracy in translation was improved with the new method, while rotation accuracy stayed in the same order.ConclusionWe demonstrated the feasibility of incorporating prior clinical registration knowledge into the online HCT-CBCT registration process. The proposed auto-registration method provides a quick and reliable starting solution for online HCT-CBCT registration.

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Illustration of the obstacles in computerized lung segmentation using examples.

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