We present an automated approach for airway tree reconstruction from CT images. Our approach performs an initial identification of tubular structures, followed by a reconstruction of the airway tree. During the reconstruction step, tubular objects that are part of the airway tree are identified and linked together based on prior knowledge about the structure of human airway trees. A major advan...

Remarkable advances in computed tomography (CT) technology geared our research toward investigating the integrative function of the lung and the development of a database of the airway tree incorporating anatomical and functional data with computational models. As part of this project, we are developing the algorithm to construct an anatomically realistic geometric model of airways from CT imag...

BACKGROUND A method for generating bronchial tree would be helpful when constructing models of the tree for benchtop experiments as well as for numerical modeling of flow or sound propagation in the airways. Early studies documented the geometric details of the human airways that were used to develop methods for generating human airway tree. However, methods for generating animal airway tree ar...

We present a fully automated method for top-down segmentation of the pulmonary arterial tree in low-dose thoracic CT images. The main basal pulmonary arteries are identified near the lung hilum by searching for candidate vessels adjacent to known airways, identified by our previously reported airway segmentation method. Model cylinders are iteratively fit to the vessels to track them into the l...

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We present a mathematical airway tree-shape framework where airway trees are compared using geodesic distances. The framework consists of a rigorously defined shape space for treelike shapes, endowed with a metric such that the shape space is a geodesic metric space. This means that the distance between two tree-shapes can be realized as the length of the geodesic, or shortest deformation, conn...

BACKGROUND Computed tomography (CT) helps physicians locate and diagnose pathological conditions. In some conditions, having an airway segmentation method which facilitates reconstruction of the airway from chest CT images can help hugely in the assessment of lung diseases. Many efforts have been made to develop airway segmentation algorithms, but methods are usually not optimized to be reliabl...

With every breath, the dynamically changing mechanical pressures must work in unison with the cells and soft tissue structures of the lung to permit air to efficiently traverse the airway tree and undergo gas exchange in the alveoli. The influence of mechanics on cell and tissue function is becoming apparent, raising the question: how does the airway tree co-exist within its mechanical environm...

In this paper, we propose to rely on a recent image representation model, namely the α-tree, to achieve efficient segmentation of images and videos. The α-tree is a multiscale representation of an image, based on its quasi-flat zones. An in-depth study of this tree reveals some interesting features of image pixels and regions. These features are then used in the design of both automatic and int...

The scheme of Horsfield et al. for describing the pulmonary airway tree (J Appl Physiol 52: 21-26, 1982) catalogs each airway according to its order and the difference in order of its two daughters (denoted Delta). Although this scheme captures the natural asymmetry in the airway tree, it is still deterministic, because it assumes that all airways of a given order are the same; yet such variabi...