Dynamic Chest Image Analysis: Evaluation of Model-based Pulmonary Perfusion Analysis with Pyramid Images

Dynamic Chest Image Analysis aims to develop model-based computer analysis and visualization methods for showing focal and general abnormalities of lung ventilation and perfusion based on a sequence of digital chest fluoroscopy frames collected with the Dynamic Pulmonary Imaging technique [18,5,17,6]. We have proposed and evaluated a multiresolutional method with an explicit ventilation model based on pyramid images for ventilation analysis. We have further extended the method for ventilation analysis to pulmonary perfusion. This paper focuses on the clinical evaluation of our method for perfusion analysis. Three clinical cases are included to illustrate the effects of contrast media in perfusion analysis and a dozen of clinical cases without using contrast media are used for evaluation. Our clinical evaluation shows that our method is effective for pulmonary embolism, demonstrating consistent correlations with computed tomography (CT) and nuclear medicine (NM) studies. This performance is the consequence of the idea that the cardiac information recorded in the perfusion image sequence may be utilized to accelerate pulmonary perfusion analysis and improve its sensitivity in detecting pulmonary embolism. Keywords—Chest images, dynamic chest image analysis, pulmonary perfusion, perfusion model, pyramid images.