A comprehensive framework for early assessment of lung injury

A novel framework for the detection of radiation-induced lung injury (RILI) from 4D computed tomography (CT) has been proposed. Our framework performs 4D-CT lung fields segmentation, deformable image registration (DIR), extraction of textural and functional features, and classification of lung voxels using deep 3D convolutional neural networks (CNN). The 4D-CT images segmentation extracts the lung fields inside the exhale phase using our multi-scale Gaussian adaptive shape prior technique followed by label propagation to other 4D-CT phases using a newly developed adaptive shape model. Then, the 4D-CT DIR locally aligns consecutive phases of the respiratory cycle using the 3D Laplace equation for finding voxel correspondences between the iso-surfaces for the fixed and moving lungs and generalized Gaussian Markov random field (GGMRF) as an anatomical consistency constraint. In addition to common lung functionality features, such as ventilation and elasticity, specific regional textural features are estimated by modeling the segmented images as samples of a novel 7th-order contrast-offset-invariant Markov-Gibbs random field (MGRF). Finally, a deep 3D CNN is applied to distinguish between the injured and normal lung tissues. 4D-CT datasets collected from 13 patients, who undergone the radiation therapy (RT), have been used in the evaluation of the proposed framework. The experimental results show the promise of our framework.