Segmentation of lung region based on using parallel implementation of joint MGRF: Validation on 3D realistic lung phantoms

The segmentation of the lung tissues in chest Computed Tomography (CT) images is an important step for developing any Computer-Aided Diagnostic (CAD) system for lung cancer and other pulmonary diseases. In this paper, we introduce a new framework to generate 3D realistic synthetic phantoms to validate our developed Joint Markov-Gibbs based lung segmentation approach from CT data. Our framework is based on using a 3D generalized Gauss-Markov Random Field (GGMRF) model of voxel intensities with pairwise interaction to model the 3D appearance of the lung tissues. Then, the appearance of the generated 3D phantoms is simulated based on iterative minimization of an energy function that is based on using the learned 3D-GGMRF image model. These 3D realistic phantoms can be used to evaluate the performance of any lung segmentation approach. In this paper, we used the 3D realistic phantoms to evaluate the performance of our developed lung segmentation approach based on using the Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) metric and the Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC). The DSC demonstrated that our approach achieves a mean DSC value of 0.994 ± 0.0034. Moreover, the ROC analysis for our method showed the best performance (area 0.99), while intensity showed the worst performance (area 0.92).