Extraction of the Airway Tree¶

To allow for automatic 3D analysis of the airways, CIRRUS Lung incorporates a fully automatic segmentation of the complete airway tree. The airway tree segmentation starts from the segmentation of the trachea. Given the trachea segmentation, the airway tree is reconstructed using wavefront propagation and adaptive thresholding. During tree reconstruction, specific criteria for accepting airway segments and subtrees are checked to ensure proper tree topology and avoid spurious branches. The segmentation of the airway tree in each scan is performed offline and can be inspected in CIRRUS Lung as an overlay, where each detected branch is labeled with a different color.  If needed, the adaptive thresholding can be adjusted by the user of CIRRUS lung to either grow more peripheral airways or terminate branches at segmental or subsegmental level for furhter analysis.

Technical publications about airway segmentation algorithms included in CIRRUS Lung¶

P. Lo, B. van Ginneken, J.M. Reinhardt, Y. Tarunashree, P.A. de Jong, B. Irving, C. Fetita, M. Ortner, R. Pinho, J. Sijbers, M. Feuerstein, A. Fabijanska, C. Bauer, R. Beichel, C.S. Mendoza, R. Wiemker, J. Lee, A.P. Reeves, S. Born, O. Weinheimer, E.M. van Rikxoort, J. Tschirren, K. Mori, B. Odry, D.P. Naidich, I.J. Hartmann, E.A. Hoffman, M. Prokop, J.H. Pedersen and M. de Bruijne. "Extraction of Airways from CT (EXACT'09)", IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging 2012;31:2093-2107. Abstract/PDF DOI PMID

E. van Rikxoort, W. Baggerman and B. van Ginneken. "Automatic segmentation of the airway tree from thoracic CT scans using a multi-threshold approach", in: The Second International Workshop on Pulmonary Image Analysis, 2009, pages 341-349. Abstract/PDF

B. van Ginneken, W. Baggerman and E.M. van Rikxoort. "Robust segmentation and anatomical labeling of the airway tree from thoracic CT scans", in: Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention, volume 5241 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2008, pages 219-226. Abstract/PDF DOI PMID