Quantitative Measurement of Volume Changes in Upper Airway

A method for quantitative measurement of air volume changes in upper airway is presented in this paper. The aim of this study is to assess the feasibility of a state-of-the-art Cone Beam Computerized Tomography (CBCT) technique for quantitative measurement of volume in upper airway. Our application is defining and tracking minute volume changes (a few milliliters) of upper airways caused by surgery, such as removal of tonsils in children, which increases volume. Traditional radiographic methods involve manual segmentation of the airway boundaries from CT scans and it is labor intensive. Most studies were done in animals in vitro . The proposed process is a semi-automatic radiographic method. Our approach is an efficient radiographic method for quantitative measurement of air volume changes in upper airway of human beings in vivo.