A framework for pulmonary fissure segmentation in 3D CT images using a directional derivative of plate filter

Abstract

Imaging pulmonary fissures by CT provides useful information on diagnosis of pulmonary diseases. Automatic segmentation of fissures is a challenging task due to the variable appearance of fissures, such as inhomogeneous intensities, pathological deformation and imaging noise. To overcome these challenges, we propose an anisotropic differential operator called directional derivative of plate (DDoP) filter to probe the presence of fissure objects in 3D space by modeling the profile of a fissure patch with three parallel plates. To reduce the huge computation burden of dense matching with rotated DDoP kernels, a family of spherical harmonics are particularly utilized for acceleration. Additionally, a two-stage post-processing scheme is introduced to segment fissures. The performance of our method was verified in experiments using 55 scans from the publicly available LOLA11 dataset and 50 low-dose CT scans of lung cancer patients from the VIA-ELCAP database. Our method showed superior performance compared to the derivative of sticks (DoS) method and the Hessian-based method in terms of median and mean F1−score. The median F1−score for DDoP, DoS-based and Hessian-based methods on the LOLA11 dataset was 0.899, 0.848 and 0.843, respectively, and the mean F1−score was 0.858 ± 0.103, 0.781 ± 0.165 and 0.747 ± 0.239, respectively.