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)).