Automatic Segmentation and Quantitative Diagnosis of Pulmonary Parenchyma in Thoracic CT

An adaptive threshold segmenting and contour tracing method was applied to extract the pulmonary parenchyma automatically from thoracic CT images. The density distribution of high resolution CT was used to determine the region and severity of emphysema.. Experimental results showed that the novel method can be adopted to segment the pulmonary parenchyma automatically and the accurate and effective results were presented as expected. This method can also be applied on analyzing the pathological change regions, performing quantitative analysis and helping on diagnosis of emphysema.