Matlab® toolbox for semi-automatic segmentation of the human nasal cavity based on active shape modeling

Abstract

The nose is a complex and important organ with a multitude of functions. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has been shown to be a valuable tool to obtain a better understanding of the functioning of the nose. CFD simulations require a surface geometry, which is constructed from tomographic data. This can be a very time-consuming task when one chooses to exclude the sinuses from the simulation domain, which in general keeps the size of the CFD model more manageable. In this work, an approach for the semi-automatic construction of the human nasal cavity is presented. In the first part, limited manual interaction is needed to create a coarse surface model. In the next part, this result is further refined based on the combination of active shape modeling with elastic surface deformation. The different steps are bundled in a Matlab toolbox with a graphical interface which guides the user. This interface allows easy manipulation of the data during intermediate steps, and also allows manual adjustments of the reconstructed nasal surface at the end. Two results are shown, and the approach and its precision are discussed. These results demonstrated that the followed approach can be used for the semi-automatic segmentation of a human nasal cavity from tomographic data, substantially reducing the amount of operator time.