A study on improvement of airway segmentation using Hybrid method

This paper presents a method for extracting an airway region from 3D chest CT volumes that uses a combination of tube enhancement filters, voxel classification based on machine learning methods and graph-cut algorithm. Lots of previous methods utilize region growing or level set algorithms without any prior knowledge of bronchi, which always fail when they reach to the peripheral bronchi. In this paper, a method of extraction based on airway shape and machine learning is proposed. The proposed method detects candidate voxels of bronchial regions by using two types of enhancement filters, and a classifier model is built for selecting the proper candidates regions based on intensity and shape features and finally the selected candidate voxels are connected by graph-cut algorithm. We applied this method on six cases of 3D chest CT volumes. The results show that this method can extract the smaller airway branches without leaking into the lung parenchyma areas.