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Updated: Jul 13, 2026
Quantitative Mapping of Specific Ventilation in the Human Lung using Proton Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Oxygen as a Contrast Agent
Published on: June 5, 2019
Registration-derived estimates of local lung expansion as surrogates for regional ventilation
Joseph M Reinhardt1, Gary E Christensen, Eric A Hoffman
1Department of Biomedical Engineering, The University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242, USA. joe-reinhardt@uiowa.edu
Abstract:
The main function of the respiratory system is gas exchange. Since many disease or injury conditions can cause biomechanical or material property changes that can alter lung function, there is a great interest in measuring regional lung ventilation. We describe a registration-based technique for estimating local lung expansion from multiple respiratory-gated CT images of the thorax. The degree of regional lung expansion is measured using the Jacobian of the registration displacement field. We compare lung expansion estimated across five pressure changes to a xenon CT based measure of specific ventilation, and have shown good agreement (linear regression, r2 = 0.89 during gas wash-in) in one animal.
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