MULTI-VIEW CNN FOR TOTAL LUNG VOLUME INFERENCE ON CARDIAC COMPUTED TOMOGRAPHY

Total lung volume (TLV) at full inspiration is a parameter of significant interest in pulmonary physiology but requires computed tomography (CT) scanning of the full axial extent of the lung. There is a growing interest to infer TLV from cardiac CT scans, which are much more widely available in epidemiologic studies. In this study, we present an original approach to train a multi-view convolutional neural network (CNN) model to infer TLV from cardiac CT scans, which visualize about 2/3rd of the lung volume. Supervised learning is used, exploiting paired full-lung and cardiac CT scans in the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA). Our results show that our network outperforms existing regression models for TLV estimation, and achieves accuracy and reproducibility comparable to the scan-rescan reproducibility of TLV on full-lung CT.