Multiscale Vessel-guided Airway Tree Segmentation

This paper presents a method for airway tree segmentation that uses a combination of a trained airway appearance model, vessel and airway orientation information, and region growing. The method uses a voxel classification based appearance model, which involves the use of a classifier that is trained to differentiate between airway and non-airway voxels. Vessel and airway orientation information are used in the form of a vessel orientation similarity measure, which indicates how similar the orientation of the an airway candidate is to the orientation of the neighboring vessel. The method is evaluated within EXACT’09 on a diverse set of CT scans. Results show a favorable combination of a relatively large portion of the tree detected correctly with very few false positives.