Development of a method for extracting airway in a three dimensional chest CT image using a deformable model

摘要

We propose a method for extracting airway in a three dimensional chest CT image using a deformable model. In the method, an airway model, whose structure is tree, is represented by some pipe models and bifurcation models defined by NURBS surfaces, and is deformed by minimizing evaluation functions. We designed the evaluation functions based on the characteristics of the airway shape and CT value distribution around the contour surface. In this paper, we show an experimental result of applying the proposed method to a real three dimensional chest CT image and evaluate its performance.