Fully Automated Extraction of Airways from CT Scans Based on Self-Adapting Region Growing

The segmentation of the airway tree is an important preliminary step for many clinical applications. In this paper we present a method for fully automated extraction of airways from volumetric computed tomography (CT) images based on a self-adapting region growing process. The method consists of 3 main steps. Firstly the histogram of a dataset is analysed. Secondly the trachea is searched and segmented. And thirdly the bronchial tree is segmented by a self-adapting region growing process. The proposed method has been applied to 40 patient datasets provided by EXACT09, a comparative study of airway extraction algorithms. Former versions of our method have been used extensively in many clinical studies.

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