RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Automatic Synthesis of Anthropomorphic Pulmonary CT Phantoms
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 022871
DO 10.1101/022871
A1 Daniel Jimenez-Carretero
A1 Raul San Jose Estepar
A1 Mario Diaz Cacio
A1 Maria J Ledesma-Carbayo
YR 2015
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/07/22/022871.abstract
AB The great density and structural complexity of pulmonary vessels and airways impose limitations on the generation of accurate reference standards, which are critical in training and in the validation of image processing methods for features such as pulmonary vessel segmentation or artery–vein (AV) separations. The design of synthetic computed tomography (CT) images of the lung could overcome these difficulties by providing a database of pseudorealistic cases in a constrained and controlled scenario where each part of the image is differentiated unequivocally. This work demonstrates a complete framework to generate computational anthropomorphic CT phantoms of the human lung automatically. Starting from biological and image-based knowledge about the topology and relationships between structures, the system is able to generate synthetic pulmonary arteries, veins, and airways using iterative growth methods that can be merged into a final simulated lung with realistic features. Visual examination and quantitative measurements of intensity distributions, dispersion of structures and relationships between pulmonary air and blood flow systems show good correspondence between real and synthetic lungs.