Human pulmonary acinar airspace segmentation from three-dimensional synchrotron radiation micro CT images of secondary pulmonary lobule

The recognition of abnormalities relative to the lobular anatomy has become increasingly important in the diagnosis and differential diagnosis of lung abnormalities at clinical routines of CT examinations. This paper aims for a 3-D microstructural analysis of the pulmonary acinus with isotropic spatial resolution in the range of several micrometers by using micro CT. Previously, we demonstrated the ability of synchrotron radiation micro CT (SRμCT) using offset scan mode in microstructural analysis of the whole part of the secondary pulmonary lobule. In this paper, we present a semiautomatic method to segment the acinar and subacinar airspaces from the secondary pulmonary lobule imaged by the SRμCT. The method began with a segmentation of the tissues such as pleural surface, interlobular septa, alveola wall, or vessel using threshold technique and 3-D connected component analysis. Follow-on stages then constructed 3-D air space separated by tissues and represented branching patterns of airways and airspaces distal to the terminal bronchiole. Finally, a graph-partitioning approach isolated acini whose stems were interactively defined as the terminal bronchiole in the secondary pulmonary lobule. Additionally, the isolated acinar airspace was segmented into subacini in which the airway was considered as the stem using the graph-partitioning approach. Results demonstrate that the proposed method can extract several acinar airspaces from the 3-D SRμCT image of secondary pulmonary lobule and that the extracted acinar airspace enable an accurate quantitative description of the anatomy of the human acinus for interpretation of the basic unit of pulmonary structure and function.