Novel method of lung area extraction in chest perfusion computed tomography

Chest perfusion computed tomography (pCT) is a useful technique in the medical diagnosis of how organs function. Perfusion CT scans are used to calculate perfusion parameters. In the case of automated methods of lung perfusion parameters calculation, the prior extraction of the lung area is desired to avoid unnecessary calculation in an area outside the lung cross-section and to avoid wasting time on processing signals of no diagnostic importance. Our new method is designed to extract a lung cross-section from a whole series of chest pCT images. It uses a complete sequence of pCT scans to extract the rough lung contour. Next each scan is processed individually, within the rough contour, to obtain a detailed, individual outline of the lungs. The proposed method and obtained results are presented and compared with methods known in literature.