Software to Measure the Geometric Properties of Airways

📄 Project Abstract

One of the most definitive ways to determine if a patient has a lung disease, such as asthma, is to analyse the airways in their lungs. This can be done non-invasively using the images produced by a computer tomography (CT) scan taken of the patient's chest area. The CT scan produces low quality images displaying cross-sectional slices of the chest, illustrating the body mass inside it. Patients with suspected asthma can be diagnosed upon inspection of these images. Using the geometric measurements of the airways it is possible to diagnose asthma and the severity of it. At the moment, these measurements are obtained by a specialist looking at the images, selecting an airway, which is then magnified, measuring these properties then using this estimation to diagnose the severity of the patient's asthma. This project investigated methods to fully automate this process, analysing the image of the CT scan to evaluate the wall thickness and lumen areas of the airways in it. This project used...