Pulmonary Fissure Detection in 3D CT Images Using a Multiple Section Model

As a typical landmark in human lungs, the detection of pulmonary fissures is of significance to computer aided diagnosis and surgery. However, the automatic detection of pulmonary fissures in CT images is a difficult task due to complex factors like their 3D membrane shape, intensity variation and adjacent interferences. Based on the observation that the fissure object often appears as thin curvilinear structures across 2D section images, we present an efficient scheme to solve this problem by merging the fissure line detection from multiple cross-sections in different directions. First, an existing oriented derivative of stick (ODoS) filter was modified for pulmonary fissure line enhancement. Then, an orientation partition scheme was applied to suppress the adhering clutters. Finally, a multiple section model was proposed for pulmonary fissure integration and segmentation. The proposed method is expected to improve fissure detection by extracting more weak objects while suppressing unrelated interferences. The performance of our scheme was validated in experiments using the publicly available open Lobe and Lung Analysis 2011 (LOLA11) dataset. Compared with manual references, the proposed scheme achieved a high segmentation accuracy, with a median F₁-score of 0.8916, which was much better than conventional methods.