Automatic segmentation of the lungs and lobes from thoracic CT scans

Lung and lobe segmentation are prerequisites for automated analysis of chest CT scans. This paper presents fully automatic methods for segmentation of the lungs and lobes from thorax CT scans. Both methods have previously been published. The lung segmentation starts by automatically identifying the trachea and main bronchi. From the trachea, the lungs are found using a region growing approach. In cases for which errors are automatically detected in the resulting lung segmentation, a multi-atlas segmentation approach is applied. The lobe segmentation is based on a multi-atlas approach and was especially designed to be robust against incomplete ssures. The methods were evaluated on 55 volumetric chest CT scans provided by the LObe and Lung Analysis 2011 (LOLA11) challenge. The scans were acquired at different sites, using several different scanners, scanning protocols, and reconstruction parameters.