Automatic Quantitative Analysis of Pulmonary Vessels in CT: Methods and Applications

In this thesis, we developed methods focusing on quantifying pulmonary vascular diseases and assessing treatment effects, based on CT images. A lung vessel segmentation method was proposed in Chapter 2, as accurately extracting lung vessels is an essentialstep for pulmonary vessel analysis. An automatic method for pulmonary vessel quantification was developed in Chapter 3, where two imaging biomarkers were proposed for quantifying the vascular morphology. In Chapter 4, the relation between these imaging biomarkers and pulmonary function were investigated in a selected SSc patient group, who had reductions in gas transfer but did not have fibrosis. The densitometry changes in pulmonary vasculature and parenchyma were studied by comparing CTPA scans before and after treatment for CTEPH patients treated with BPA, in Chapter 5. A vascular tree matching method was proposed for matching pulmonaryvasculature trees, for quantifying changes in vascular morphology for CTEPH patients in Chapter 6.