Pulmonary organs analysis method and its application to differential diagnosis based on thoracic Thin-section CT Images

To diagnose the lung cancer as to determine if it has malignant or benign nature, it is important to understand the spatial relationship among the abnormal nodule and other pulmonary organs. But the lung field has very complicated structure, so it is difficult to understand the connectivity of the pulmonary organs and the abnormal nodule for even medical doctors. In this paper, we describe a 3D image analysis method of the pulmonary organs using Thin-section CT images. This method consists of two parts. The first is the classification of the pulmonary structure based on the anatomical information. The second is the quantitative analysis which is then applicable to differential diagnosis, such as differentiation of malignant or benign abnormal tissue.