Bustacara-Medina,C., Flórez-Valencia,L., Hurtado,J. H.
Abstract:
Direct measurements of airway tree and wall areas are potentially useful as a diagnostic tool and as an aid to understanding the pathos-physiology underlying airways disease. Direct measurements can be made from images obtained using computer tomography (CT) by applying computer-based algorithms to segment airways, but current validation techniques cannot adequately establish the accuracy and precision of these algorithms. Additional, the majority of the studies only include the airways from trachea to bronchi’s tree avoid the upper respiratory system[1], because the main problems appears in the lower respiratory system, for example, asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary (airflow obstruction or limitation, including chronic bronchitis, emphysema and bronchiectasis). Airway tree segmentation can be performed manually by an image analyst, but the complexity of the tree makes manual segmentation tedious and extremely time-consuming (require several hours of analysis) [2], only including trachea and lower airway system. Airway tree segmentation in CT images is a challenging problem because of the complex anatomy and the limitations in image quality inherent to CT image acquisition. This paper describe a semi-automatic technique to segment the airway tree (upper airway system and trachea) in three-dimensional CT images of the head-neck based on fast marching algorithms. Additionally, a heuristic is proposed to determine the algorithm parameters without having to review all structure to segment.