A graph-cut approach for pulmonary artery-vein segmentation in noncontrast CT images

Lung vessel segmentation has been widely explored by the biomedical image processing community; however, the differentiation of arterial from venous irrigation is still a challenge. Pulmonary artery-vein (AV) segmentation using computed tomography (CT) is growing in importance owing to its undeniable utility in multiple cardiopulmonary pathological states, especially those implying vascular remodelling, allowing the study of both flow systems separately. We present a new framework to approach the separation of tree-like structures using local information and a specifically designed graph-cut methodology that ensures connectivity as well as the spatial and directional consistency of the derived subtrees. This framework has been applied to the pulmonary AV classification using a random forest (RF) pre-classifier to exploit the local anatomical differences of arteries and veins. The evaluation of the system was performed using 192 bronchopulmonary segment phantoms, 48 anthropomorphic pulmonary CT phantoms, and 26 lungs from noncontrast CT images with precise voxel-based reference standards obtained by manually labelling the vessel trees. The experiments reveal a relevant improvement in the accuracy ( ∼ 20%) of the vessel particle classification with the proposed framework with respect to using only the pre-classification based on local information applied to the whole area of the lung under study. The results demonstrated the accurate differentiation between arteries and veins in both clinical and synthetic cases, specifically when the image quality can guarantee a good airway segmentation, which opens a huge range of possibilities in the clinical study of cardiopulmonary diseases.