Assessment of Tracheal Stenosis Using Active Shape Models of Healthy Tracheas: A Surface Registration Study

Tracheal stenosis is a life threatening condition for which the successful treatment relies on the precise evaluation of its dimensions and severity. Recently, Active Shape Models (ASMs) were proposed for stenosis assessment and stent prediction, with promising results. An effective ASM, however, depends on the applied surface registration technique, which should not be influenced by the stenotic regions. The present work reviews previously proposed registration techniques and formulates a new method to estimate the shape of the healthy trachea of a patient with stenosis. Experiments with real and simulation data showed that the new method outperforms the conventional methods with respect to registration accuracy.