Lobe Segmentation¶

To allow for regional analysis of lung parenchyma, CIRRUS Lung includes an automatic segmentation of the pulmonary lobes. Since automatic lobar segmentation is a challenging task, especially in cases with incomplete fissures and/or pathological abnormalities altering the lobar shapes, CIRRUS Lung incorporates three different state-of-the-art algorithms for automatic lobar segmentation (Lassen et al. (2013), van Rikxoort et al. (2010), van Rikxoort et al. (2009)). All methods start with a segmentation of the pulmonary fissures and incorporate varying amounts of knowledge about the anatomy of the bronchial tree, vessel tree, and lungs. Automatic lobar segmentation is run offline, the result can be inspected in CIRRUS Lung as an overlay on the original CT data. In case of unsatisfactory results of the automatic lobar segmentation, an efficient 3-dimensional interactive method is available to correct the lobar borders (Lassen et al. (2011)). 

Technical publications about lobe segmentation algorithms included in CIRRUS Lung¶

B. Lassen, E.M. van Rikxoort, M. Schmidt, S. Kerkstra, B. van Ginneken and J. Kuhnigk. "Automatic segmentation of the pulmonary lobes from chest CT scans based on fissures, vessels, and bronchi", IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging 2013;32:210-222. Abstract/PDF DOI PMID

B. Lassen, J.M. Kuhnigk, E.M. van Rikxoort and H.O. Peitgen. "Interactive lung lobe segmentation and correction in tomographic images", in: Medical Imaging, volume 7963 of Proceedings of the SPIE, 2011, pages 79631S-1-79631S-6. Abstract/PDF DOI

E.M. van Rikxoort, M. Prokop, B. de Hoop, M. Viergever, J. Pluim and B. van Ginneken. "Automatic Segmentation of Pulmonary Lobes Robust Against Incomplete Fissures", IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging 2010;29:1286-1296. Abstract/PDF DOI PMID

E.M. van Rikxoort, B. de Hoop, S. van de Vorst, M. Prokop and B. van Ginneken. "Automatic segmentation of pulmonary segments from volumetric chest CT scans", IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging 2009;28:621-630.Abstract/PDF DOI PMID

E.M. van Rikxoort, B. van Ginneken, M. Klik and M. Prokop. "Supervised enhancement filters: application to fissure detection in chest CT scans", IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging 2008;27:1-10. Abstract/PDF DOI PMID