Automatic quantification of tree-in-bud patterns from CT scans

Abstract

In this paper, we present a fully automatic method to quantify Tree-in-Bud (TIB) patterns for respiratory tract infections. The proposed quantification method is based on our previous effort to detect and track TIB patterns with a computer assisted detection (CAD) system [9]. In addition to accurately identifying TIB on CT, quantifying TIB is important for measuring the volume of affected lung as a potantial marker of disease severity. This quantification can be challenging due to the complex shape of TIB and high intensity variation contributing mixed features. Our proposed quantification method is based on a local scale concept such that TIB regions detected via the CAD system are quantified adaptively, and volume percentages of the quantified regions are compared to visual scoring of participating radiologists. We conducted the experiments with a data set of 94 chest CTs (laboratory confirmed 39 viral bronchiolitis caused by human parainfluenza (HPIV), 34 nontuberculous mycobacterial (NTM), and 21 normal control). Experimental results show that the proposed quantification system is well suited to the CAD system for detecting TIB patterns. Correlations of observer-CAD agreements are reported as (R2 = 0.824, p < 0.01) and (R2 = 0.801, p < 0.01) for HPIV and NTM cases, respectively.