Tapering Analysis of Airways with Bronchiectasis
Bronchiectasis is the permanent dilation of airways. Patients with the disease can suffer recurrent exacerbations, reducing their quality of life. The gold standard to diagnose and monitor bronchiectasis is accomplished by inspection of chest computed tomography (CT) scans. A clinician examines the broncho-arterial ratio to determine if an airway is brochiectatic. The visual analysis assumes the blood vessel diameter remains constant, although this assumption is disputed in the literature. We propose a simple measurement of tapering along the airways to diagnose and monitor bronchiectasis. To this end, we constructed a pipeline to measure the cross-sectional area along the airways at contiguous intervals, starting from the carina to the most distal point observable. Using a phantom with calibrated 3D printed structures, the precision and accuracy of our algorithm extends to the sub voxel level. The tapering measurement is robust to bifurcations along the airway and was applied to chest CT images acquired in clinical practice. The result is a statistical difference in tapering rate between airways with bronchiectasis and controls. Our code is available at https://github.com/quan14/AirwayTaperingInCT.
Code (2)
Tasks
Computed Tomography (CT)Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Reproducibility of an airway tapering measurement in CT with application to bronchiectasis
Purpose: This paper proposes a pipeline to acquire a scalar tapering measurement from the carina to the most distal point of an individual airway visible on CT. We show the applicability of using tapering measurements on…
Automatic Airway Segmentation in chest CT using Convolutional Neural Networks
Segmentation of the airway tree from chest computed tomography (CT) images is critical for quantitative assessment of airway diseases including bronchiectasis and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). However, ob…
Computed Tomography (CT)Data AugmentationSegmentationEvaluation of automated airway morphological quantification for assessing fibrosing lung disease
Abnormal airway dilatation, termed traction bronchiectasis, is a typical feature of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF). Volumetric computed tomography (CT) imaging captures the loss of normal airway tapering in IPF. We …
Computed Tomography (CT)Methods to Measure the Broncho-Arterial Ratio and Wall Thickness in the Right Lower Lobe for Defining Radiographic Reversibility of Bronchiectasis
The diagnosis of bronchiectasis requires measuring abnormal bronchial dilation. It is confirmed using a chest CT scan, where the key feature is an increased broncho-arterial ratio (BAR) (>0.8 in children), often with bro…
Relationship between pulmonary nodule malignancy and surrounding pleurae, airways and vessels: a quantitative study using the public LIDC-IDRI dataset
To investigate whether the pleurae, airways and vessels surrounding a nodule on non-contrast computed tomography (CT) can discriminate benign and malignant pulmonary nodules. The LIDC-IDRI dataset, one of the largest pub…
Computed Tomography (CT)