Effect of Reducing Field of View on Multidetector Quantitative Computed Tomography Parameters of Airway Wal Thickness in Asthma

摘要

Patients with asthma undergo structural airway changes that include subepithelial fibrosis, smooth muscle hypertrophy, airway wall edema, and blood vessel hyperplasia, collectively referred to as airway remodeling. These changes lead to airway wall thickening, are more pronounced in patients with severe asthma, and are associated with irreversible airflow obstruction. Measuring airway wall thickness (WT) metrics with computed tomography (CT) can provide noninvasive indices of airway remodeling that correlate with lung function, asthma severity, and histologic measures of airway remodeling. Most CT methods used to quantify airway WT and wall area (WA) overestimate these measures and underestimate airway lumen measurements. Although the reasons are multifactorial, this is in part due to the similar scale ofCT image pixel dimension and airway WT, which leads to partial volume averaging and can be problematic in measurement of smaller airways.