Computerized detection of pulmonary embolism in computed tomographic pulmonary angiography (CTPA): improvement of vessel segmentation

Chuan Zhou; Heang-Ping Chan; Jean W. Kuriakose; Aamer Chughtai; Lubomir M. Hadjiiski; Jun Wei; Smita Patel; Ella A. Kazerooni

doi:10.1117/12.878156

15 March 2011 Computerized detection of pulmonary embolism in computed tomographic pulmonary angiography (CTPA): improvement of vessel segmentation

Chuan Zhou, Heang-Ping Chan, Jean W. Kuriakose, Aamer Chughtai, Lubomir M. Hadjiiski, Jun Wei, Smita Patel, Ella A. Kazerooni

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 7963, Medical Imaging 2011: Computer-Aided Diagnosis; 79630L (2011) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.878156
Event: SPIE Medical Imaging, 2011, Lake Buena Vista (Orlando), Florida, United States

Abstract

Vessel segmentation is a fundamental step in an automated pulmonary embolism (PE) detection system. The purpose of this study is to improve the segmentation scheme for pulmonary vessels affected by PE and other lung diseases. We have developed a multiscale hierarchical vessel enhancement and segmentation (MHES) method for pulmonary vessel tree extraction based on the analysis of eigenvalues of Hessian matrices. However, it is difficult to segment the pulmonary vessels accurately when the vessel is occluded by PEs and/or surrounded by lymphoid tissues or lung diseases. In this study, we developed a method that combines MHES with level set refinement (MHES-LSR) to improve vessel segmentation accuracy. The level set was designed to propagate the initial object contours to the regions with relatively high gray-level, high gradient, and high compactness as measured by the smoothness of the curvature along vessel boundaries. Two and eight CTPA scans were randomly selected as training and test data sets, respectively. Forty volumes of interest (VOI) containing "representative" vessels were manually segmented by a radiologist experienced in CTPA interpretation and used as reference standard. The results show that, for the 32 test VOIs, the average percentage volume error relative to the reference standard was improved from 31.7±10.9% using the MHES method to 7.7±4.7% using the MHES-LSR method. The correlation between the computer-segmented vessel volume and the reference standard was improved from 0.954 to 0.986. The accuracy of vessel segmentation was improved significantly (p<0.05). The MHES-LSR method may have the potential to improve PE detection.

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Chuan Zhou, Heang-Ping Chan, Jean W. Kuriakose, Aamer Chughtai, Lubomir M. Hadjiiski, Jun Wei, Smita Patel, and Ella A. Kazerooni "Computerized detection of pulmonary embolism in computed tomographic pulmonary angiography (CTPA): improvement of vessel segmentation", Proc. SPIE 7963, Medical Imaging 2011: Computer-Aided Diagnosis, 79630L (15 March 2011); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.878156

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