Wall Thickness Measurement of Respiratory Airway in CT Images: Signal Processing Aspects

Airway wall thickness is an important bio-marker for evaluation of pulmonary diseases such as stenosis, bronchiectasis. Nevertheless, an image-based analysis of the airway tree can provide precise and valuable airway size information, quantitative measurement of airway wall thickness in CT images involves various sources of error and uncertainty. So we have developed an accurate airway wall measurement technique for small airways with three-dimensional (3-D) approach. To illustrate performance of these techniques, we used airway phantom that consisted of 4 acryl tubes with various inner and outer diameters. Results show that evaluation of interpolation and deconvolution methods of airways in 3-D CT images, and significant improvement over the full-width-half-maximum method for measurement of not only location of the luminal and outer edge of the airway wall but airway wall thickness.