Combining Different Reconstruction Kernel Responses as Preprocessing Step for Airway Tree Extraction in CT Scan

In this paper, we propose a new preprocessing procedure that combines the responses of different Computed Tomography (CT) reconstruction kernels in order to improve the segmentation of the airway tree. These filters are available in all commercial CT scanner. A broad range of preprocessing techniques have been proposed but all of them operate on images reconstructed using a single reconstruction filter. In this work, the new preprocessing approach is based on a fusion of images reconstructed using different reconstruction kernels and can be included as a preprocessing stage in every segmentation pipeline. Our approach has been applied on various CT scans and an experimental comparison study between state of the art of segmentation approaches results performed on processed and unprocessed data has been made. Results show that the fusion process improves segmentation results and removes false positives.