Journal article
Topomorphologic Separation of Fused Isointensity Objects via Multiscale Opening: Separating Arteries and Veins in 3-D Pulmonary CT
IEEE transactions on medical imaging, Vol.29(3), pp.840-851
03/2010
DOI: 10.1109/TMI.2009.2038224
PMCID: PMC4517589
PMID: 20199919
Abstract
A novel multiscale topomorphologic approach for opening of two isointensity objects fused at different locations and scales is presented and applied to separating arterial and venous trees in 3-D pulmonary multidetector X-ray computed tomography (CT) images. Initialized with seeds, the two isointensity objects (arteries and veins) grow iteratively while maintaining their spatial exclusiveness and eventually form two mutually disjoint objects at convergence. The method is intended to solve the following two fundamental challenges: how to find local size of morphological operators and how to trace continuity of locally separated regions. These challenges are met by combining fuzzy distance transform (FDT), a morphologic feature with a topologic fuzzy connectivity, and a new morphological reconstruction step to iteratively open finer and finer details starting at large scales and progressing toward smaller scales. The method employs efficient user intervention at locations where local morphological separability assumption does not hold due to imaging ambiguities or any other reason. The approach has been validated on mathematically generated tubular objects and applied to clinical pulmonary noncontrast CT data for separating arteries and veins. The tradeoff between accuracy and the required user intervention for the method has been quantitatively examined by comparing with manual outlining. The experimental study, based on a blind seed selection strategy, has demonstrated that above 95% accuracy may be achieved using 25–40 seeds for each of arteries and veins. Our method is very promising for semiautomated separation of arteries and veins in pulmonary CT images even when there is no object-specific intensity variation at conjoining locations.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Topomorphologic Separation of Fused Isointensity Objects via Multiscale Opening: Separating Arteries and Veins in 3-D Pulmonary CT
- Creators
- Punam K Saha - Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Department of Radiology, The University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242 USAZhiyun Gao - Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242 USASara K Alford - University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242 USAMilan Sonka - Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences, and the Department of Radiation Oncology, The University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242 USAEric A Hoffman - Department of Radiology and Biomedical Engineering, The University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242 USA
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- IEEE transactions on medical imaging, Vol.29(3), pp.840-851
- DOI
- 10.1109/TMI.2009.2038224
- PMID
- 20199919
- PMCID
- PMC4517589
- NLM abbreviation
- IEEE Trans Med Imaging
- ISSN
- 0278-0062
- eISSN
- 1558-254X
- Publisher
- Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 03/2010
- Academic Unit
- Roy J. Carver Department of Biomedical Engineering; Radiology; Electrical and Computer Engineering; Radiation Oncology; Injury Prevention Research Center; Internal Medicine; Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences
- Record Identifier
- 9984047798902771
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