This study measured the accuracy of our airway quantification scheme using phantoms airway under different CT protocols. Airway remodeling is associated with several thoracic diseases (e.g., chronic bronchitis, asthma, and bronchiectasis), and, therefore, quantification of airway remodeling may have wide clinical application. Our scheme assigns pixels partial membership in the airway wall and lumen based on the pixel's HU value, which is intended to account for partial volume averaging inherent in CT image reconstruction. Twenty-four phantom airways with an outer diameter from 2.6 to 14.0 mm and wall thicknesses from 0.5 to 2.0 mm were analyzed. The absolute differences between measurements supplied by the manufacture and computed from CT images acquired at 40 mAs and reconstructed at 1.25 mm thickness using GE's "soft" and "lung" reconstruction kernels for lumen area ranged from 1.4% to 49.3% and 0.4% to 33.0%, respectively, and for wall area ranged from 0.3% to 118.0% and 2.1 to 92.9%, respectively. Accuracy typically improved as the kernel's spatial frequency increased. Airways whose wall thickness was close to the pixels dimensions were challenging to quantify. The partial membership assignment of our airway quantification accurately computed airway morphometry across a range of phantom airway sizes.

Date Published: 29 March 2007
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 6511, Medical Imaging 2007: Physiology, Function, and Structure from Medical Images, 65111R (29 March 2007); doi: 10.1117/12.709940

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 6511:
Medical Imaging 2007: Physiology, Function, and Structure from Medical Images
Armando Manduca; Xiaoping P. Hu, Editor(s)