An automated pulmonary parenchyma segmentation method based on an improved region growing algorithm in PET-CT imaging

• Published in: 中国计算机科学前沿：英文版 2016-02 (1), p.189-200
• Main Author: Juanjuan ZHAO Guohua JI Xiaohong HAN Yan QIANG Xiaolei LIAO
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 传统方法; 分割方法; 图像二值化; 显像; 正电子发射; 生长算法; 肺; 计算机断层
• ISSN: 2095-2228; 2095-2236
• DOI: 10.1007/s11704-015-4543-x

To address the incomplete problem in pulmonary parenchyma segmentation based on the traditional methods, a novel automated segmentation method based on an eight- neighbor region growing algorithm with left-right scanning and four-corner rotating and scanning is proposed in this pa- per. The proposed method consists of four main stages： image binarization, rough segmentation of lung, image denoising and lung contour refining. First, the binarization of images is done and the regions of interest are extracted. After that, the rough segmentation of lung is performed through a general region growing method. Then the improved eight-neighbor region growing is used to remove noise for the upper, mid- dle, and bottom region of lung. Finally, corrosion and ex- pansion operations are utilized to smooth the lung boundary. The proposed method was validated on chest positron emis- sion tomography-computed tomography （PET-CT） data of 30 cases from a hospital in Shanxi, China. Experimental results show that our method can achieve an average volume overlap ratio of 96.21 ± 0.39% with the manual segmentation results. Compared with the existing methods, the proposed algorithm segments the lung in PET-CT images more efficiently and ac- curately.