Sedghi Gamechi, Zahra

English

Cardiovascular diseases and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease(COPD) are among the major leading causes of death globally. In thesearch for early identification of individuals at risk of cardiovasculardisease in COPD, imaging-based assessments of the shape and size of theaorta and pulmonary artery have rapidly gained interest. Changes inthese two large arteries may indicate cardiovascular diseases such aspulmonary hypertension and aortic aneurysm. Furthermore, the ratio ofthe diameter of the pulmonary artery to ascending aorta at the level ofpulmonary artery bifurcation is shown to be associated with an increasedrisk of severe exacerbations and increased mortality in patients withCOPD. Therefore, it is essential to accurately delineate and quantify theanatomy of the aorta and pulmonary artery. With the growing use oflow-dose non-contrast thoracic CT scans for lung cancer screening, thereis an opportunity to measure the aorta and pulmonary artery in thesescans. However, performing diameter measurements manually is laborintensive; therefore, automatic 3D segmentation and measurementtechniques are desirable.This thesis develops and validates fully automatic segmentation anddiameter measurement techniques to quantify the shape and size ofaorta and pulmonary arteries in CT scans. It presents a method based onoptimal surface graph cuts to segment the aorta and pulmonary arteriesseparately and extract landmarks for each vessel for automatic diametermeasurement. It also presents a new deep-learning-based approuchnamed Posterior-CRF, for jointly segmenting the vessels. The methodspresent robust and reproducible results of sufficient accuracy andreliability for use in the clinical study

EUR Research Repository

Automatic Quantification of the Aorta and Pulmonary Artery in Chest CT:methods and validation in lung screening

https://pure.eur.nl/files/42108245/Zahra_thesis.pdf

Automatic Quantification of the Aorta and Pulmonary Artery in Chest CT:methods and validation in lung screening

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

EUR Research Repository