Extraction of pulmonary fissures from thin-section CT images using calculation of surface-curvatures and morphology filters

This paper present an automatic extraction algorithm of the pulmonary major and minor fissures from three-dimensional (3-D) chest thin-section computed tomography (CT) images of helical CT. These fissures are used for the diagnosis of lung cancer and the analysis of pulmonary conformation. The proposed algorithm improves on the previous extraction method using the surface-curvatures calculation for density profile and morphological filters. The proposed method can extract the major and minor fissures in contact with the nodule and the chest walls. We apply the proposed algorithm to 12 patients. The results of our method are more accuracy to extract fissures around pulmonary lesions than by the previous method. The warped fissures extracted by our method show that lesions near fissures are malignant. Extracted fissures will aid in the diagnosis of lung cancer and in the analysis of automatic pulmonary conformation by using a computer.