Creation of standardized geometric model of the human upper respiratory airway

Abstract

A novel, standardized geometric model of the human upper respiratory tract was created by aligning and processing the computed tomography (CT) scans of upper respiratory airway of healthy subjects. Digital three-dimensional (3-D) geometric model of 3 single human upper respiratory airway were generated from the CT scans and a methodology was developed to scale, orient, and align the models, after which 2-D digital coronal cross-section slices were generated. With the use of an image processing algorithm, median cross-sectional geometries were created to match median physical parameters which retaining the unique geometric feature of human upper respiratory airway. From these idealized 2-D images and the original image-fusion model was created. Then, the statistical data of human upper respiratory airway was used to scale the model and to get the standardized model. Compared to the simplified model, the standardized model is more similar to the real human upper respiratory tract in the completeness of structural characteristics and the reality of geometry, the deviation degree of key dimension is only 0.16, and it possesses more application value in scientific research.