Abstract:
Pulmonary hypertension (PH) is a chronic disorder of the pulmonary circulation, marked by an elevated vascular resistance and pressure. Our objective is to find an automatic, non-invasive method for estimating the pulmonary pressure based on the analysis of lung vessels from contrast enhanced CT images. We present a pulmonary vessel extraction algorithm which is fast, fully automatic and robust. It uses an airway tree segmentation and a left and right lung labeled volume to restrict the response of an offset medialness vessel enhancement filter. On a data set of 24 patients, we show that quantitative indices derived from the vascular tree are applicable to distinguish patients with and without PH.