Pedro P. Rebouças Filho, Paulo Cesar Cortez, Victor Hugo C. de Albuquerque
Graduate Program in Applied Informatics, University of Fortaleza, Fortaleza, Brazil.
Industry Area, Federal Institute of Education Science and Technology of Ceará, Maracanaú, Brazil.
Teleinformatic Engineering Department, Federal University of Ceará, Fortaleza, Brazil.
DOI: 10.4236/jbise.2013.611138   PDF    HTML     5,335 Downloads   8,508 Views   Citations

Abstract

Computing systems have been playing an important role in various medical fields, notably in image diagnosis. Studies in the field of Computational Vision aim at developing techniques and systems capable of detecting various illnesses automatically. What has been highlighted among the existing exams that allow diagnosis aid and the application of computing systems in parallel is Computed Tomography (CT). CT enables the visualization of internal organs, such as the lung and its structures. Computational Vision systems extract information from the CT images by segmenting the regions of interest, and then recognize and identify details in those images. This work focuses on the segmentation phase of CT lung images with singularity-based techniques. Among these methods are the region growing (RG) technique and its 3D RG variations and the thresholding technique with multi-thresholding. The 3D RG method is applied to lung segmentation and from the 3D RG segments of the lung hilum, the multi-thresholding can segment the blood vessels, lung emphysema and the bones. The results of lung segmentation in this work were evaluated by two pulmonologists. The results obtained showed that these methods can integrate aid systems for medical diagnosis in the pulmonology field.

Keywords

3D Region Growing; Lungs segmentation; COPD; Pulmonary Structure Visualization; Computed Tomography

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Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

References

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