Visual analysis of pulmonary blood flow in pulmonary circulation assessment: differences between two variant...

Area of Science:

• Pulmonary medicine
• Medical imaging
• Quantitative analysis

Background:

• Dynamic imaging systems offer methods for quantitative pulmonary blood flow assessment.
• Cross-correlation calculation processing (CCC-pro) and reference frame subtraction processing (RFS-pro) are two algorithms used for this purpose.
• Comparative evaluation of these algorithms across different pulmonary circulation aspects is needed.

Purpose of the Study:

• To analyze the differences between CCC-pro and RFS-pro in assessing pulmonary circulation.
• To compare the performance of these algorithms against pulmonary perfusion scintigraphy (PPS) in lung cancer patients.

Main Methods:

• Cross-sectional study involving 46 lung cancer patients undergoing radical surgery, dynamic chest radiography (DCR), and PPS.
• Correlation and linear regression analyses were used to compare PPS with CCC-pro and RFS-pro for blood flow ratio (BFR).
• Bland-Altman analysis assessed agreement; pulmonary blood flow distributions were compared across lung fields.

Main Results:

• CCC-pro showed a stronger correlation with PPS (R=0.859) than RFS-pro (R=0.549) for BFR quantification.
• Both algorithms demonstrated high agreement via Bland-Altman analysis, though RFS-pro showed systematic errors.
• RFS-pro provided more detailed blood flow distribution in lung fields, with CCC-pro and RFS-pro showing similar upper/lower lung distribution.

Conclusions:

• CCC-pro is effective for quantifying blood flow ratio (BFR).
• RFS-pro excels at evaluating pulmonary blood flow distribution.
• Further development is necessary for versatile pulmonary blood flow analysis using these algorithms.