An Efficient Approach to Pulmonary Vessels Extraction Based on Curve Evolution

Pulmonary vessels extraction is a challenging task in clinical medicine. Many pulmonary diseases are accompanied by the changes of vessel diameters. The vessels and their branches, which exhibit much variability, are most important in performing diagnosis and planning the follow-up therapies. In this paper, we propose an efficient approach to pulmonary vessels extraction based on the curve evolution. This approach models the vessels as monotonically marching front under the speed field integrating both the region and the edge information where a new region speed function is designed and integrated with the edge based speed function. Due to the region based speed term, the front could even propagate in small narrow vessel branches. To further improve the segmentation results, a multi-initial fast marching algorithm is developed to fast implement the numerical solution, which may avoid the monotonically marching front leaking out of the weak boundary too earlier and also reduce the computational cost. The validity of our approach is demonstrated by CT pulmonary vessels extraction. Experiments show that the segmentation results by our approach, especially on the narrow thin vessel branches extraction, are more precise than that of the existing method.

PULMONARY VESSEL EXTRACTION BASED ON COHERENCE DIFFUSION AND FAST MARCHING

Objective To accurately extract pulmonary vessels on medical images. Methods An efficient vessel segmentation framework is presented, which includes a smoothing method and a extraction algorithm. The smoothing method is based on an improved coherence diffusion approach that integrates the second-order directional differential information. It can analyze weak edges such as narrow peak or ridge-like structures. Meanwhile, an improved extraction algorithm is proposed. It is based on a fast marching algorithm where a sorted sequence array and multi-initialization technique are applied. Results The improved coherence diffusion approach can precisely preserve important oriented patterns and remove noises on the images. Experimental results on several images show that the proposed method can effectively find the location of pulmonary vessels. Conclusion The segmentation method is accurate and fast that can be a useful tool for medical imaging applications.

3D pulmonary vessel segmentation based on improved residual attention u-net

Automatic segmentation of pulmonary vessels is a fundamental and essential task for the diagnosis of various pulmonary vessels diseases.The accuracy of segmentation is suffering from the complex vascular structure.In this paper,an Improved Residual Attention U-Net(IRAU-Net)aiming to segment pulmonary vessel in 3D is proposed.To extract more vessel structure information,the Squeeze and Excitation(SE)block is embedded in the down sampling stage.And in the up sampling stage,the global attention module(GAM)is used to capture target features in both high and low levels.These two stages are connected by Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling(ASPP)which can sample in various receptive fields with a low computational cost.By the evaluation experiment,the better performance of IRAU-Net on the segmentation of terminal vessel is indicated.It is expected to provide robust support for clinical diagnosis and treatment.

Right Sub-Axillary Incision for Right Pulmonary Vein Atresia in a Child:A Case Report and Literature Review

Unilateral pulmonary vein atresia(UPVA)in children is a rare disease that is characterized by a recurrent pulmonary infection and hemoptysis in childhood.This paper is a report of a case of pulmonary venous atresia treated by a right sub-axillary incision.Hopefully,more literature can be produced to improve the awareness and treatment level of pulmonary vein atresia.

Optical coherence tomography of the pulmonary arteries in children with congenital heart diseases:A systematic review

Importance:Optical coherence tomography(OCT)is a high-resolution intravascular imaging tool and has shown promise for providing real-time quantitative and qualitative descriptions of pulmonary vascular structures in vivo in adult pulmonary hypertension(PH),while not popular in pediatric patients with congenital heart diseases(CHD).Objective:The aim of this review is to summarize all the available evidence on the use of OCT for imaging pulmonary vascular remodeling in pediatric patients.Methods:We conducted the systematic literature resources(Cochran Library database,Medline via PubMed,EMBASE,and Web of Knowledge)from January 2010 to December 2021 and the search terms were“PH”,“child”,“children”,“pediatric”,“OCT”,“CHD”,“pulmonary vessels”,“pulmonary artery wall”.Studies in which OCT was used to image the pulmonary vessels in pediatric patients with CHD were considered for inclusion.Results:Five studies met the inclusion criteria.These five papers discussed the study of OCT in the pulmonary vasculature of different types of CHD,including common simple CHD,complex cyanotic CHD,and Williams-Beuren syndrome.In biventricular anatomy,pulmonary vascular remodeling was primarily reflected by pulmonary intima thickening from two-dimensional OCT.In single-ventricle anatomy,due to the state of hypoxia,the morphology of pulmonary vessels was indirectly reflected by the number and shape of nourishing vessels from three-dimensional OCT.Interpretation:OCT may be an adequate imaging procedure for the demonstration of pulmonary vascular structures and provide additional information in pediatric patients.