Automatic segmentation of pulmonary fissures in computed tomography images using 3D surface features

Pulmonary interlobar fissures are important anatomic structures in human lungs and are useful in locating and classifying lung abnormalities. Automatic segmentation of fissures is a difficult task because of their low contrast and large variability. We developed a fully automatic training-free approach for fissure segmentation based on the local bending degree (LBD) and the maximum bending index (MBI). The LBD is determined by the angle between the eigenvectors of two Hessian matrices for a pair of adjacent voxels. It is used to construct a constraint to extract the candidate surfaces in three-dimensional (3D) space. The MBI is a measure to discriminate cylindrical surfaces from planar surfaces in 3D space. Our approach for segmenting fissures consists of five steps, including lung segmentation, plane-like structure enhancement, surface extraction with LBD, initial fissure identification with MBI, and fissure extension based on local plane fitting. When applying our approach to 15 chest computed tomography (CT) scans, the mean values of the positive predictive value, the sensitivity, the root-mean square (RMS) distance, and the maximal RMS are 91 %, 88 %, 1.01 ± 0.99 mm, and 11.56 mm, respectively, which suggests that our algorithm can efficiently segment fissures in chest CT scans.