A novel method for identification of COPD in inspiratory and expiratory states of CT images

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) refers to a group of lung diseases that block airflow and cause a huge degree of human suffering. While there is no cure for COPD and the lung damage that results in this disease cannot be reversed, it is very important to diagnose it as early as possible. Additional to diagnosis, using a mathematical model to estimate severity of disease would be helpful for evaluation of treatment effects. This paper presents a new method for identifying COPD from three-dimensional (3-D) pulmonary X-ray CT images. The method has five main steps. First, corresponding positions of lungs in inspiration and expiration are found based on anatomical structures. Then, lung regions are segmented from the CT images by active contours. Next, the left and right lungs are separated using a sequence of morphological operations. Then, parenchyma variations in each lung are found as a relationship between inspiratory and expiratory states. Finally, a classifier is used to decide about the disease and its severity. A t-test is done to evaluate the results. Twelve patients with variable severity of COPD and twelve normal adults were included in this study. The proposed method may assist radiologists in the detection of COPD as a computer aided diagnosis (CAD) system.