Landscaping the effect of CT reconstruction parameters: Robust Interstitial Pulmonary Fibrosis quantitation

Inter- and intra-rater agreement in assessing Interstitial Pulmonary Fibrosis (IPF) on CT scans is poor. Lack of approaches to understand the nuances of CT reconstruction parameters and their effect on patient scans hampers objective IPF quantification. In this paper, we propose an image analytic methodology to characterize the relationship between CT reconstruction parameters and IPF manifestation in scans. The raw data acquired from a patient was reconstructed with a combination of image thickness, interval and reconstruction kernels to derive 104 datasets. Quantitative and qualitative analyses were performed on the regional statistics computed in the neighborhood of each parenchymal voxel and for expert-chosen regions of interest (ROIs). The proposed approach could facilitate the selection of optimal CT reconstruction parameters to more robustly quantify IPF.