Development and Validation of Automated 2D–3D Bronchial Airway Matching to Track Changes in Regional Bronchial Morphology Using Serial Low-Dose Chest CT Scans in Children with Chronic Lung Disease

Abstract

To address potential concern for cumulative radiation exposure with serial spiral chest computed tomography (CT) scans in children with chronic lung disease, we developed an approach to match bronchial airways on low-dose spiral and low-dose high-resolution CT (HRCT) chest images to allow serial comparisons. An automated algorithm matches the position and orientation of bronchial airways obtained from HRCT slices with those in the spiral CT scan. To validate this algorithm, we compared manual matching vs automatic matching of bronchial airways in three pediatric patients. The mean absolute percentage difference between the manually matched spiral CT airway and the index HRCT airways were 9.4±8.5% for the internal diameter measurements, 6.0±4.1% for the outer diameter measurements, and 10.1±9.3% for the wall thickness measurements. The mean absolute percentage difference between the automatically matched spiral CT airway measurements and index HRCT airway measurements were 9.2±8.6% for the inner diameter, 5.8±4.5% for the outer diameter, and 9.9±9.5% for the wall thickness. The overall difference between manual and automated methods was 2.1±1.2%, which was significantly less than the interuser variability of 5.1±4.6%

Novel end points for clinical trials in young children with cystic fibrosis

“…Tools to quantify structural lung disease in CF are in various stages of development (93–96), and (semi-) automated quantitative assessments of lung structure are likely to be preferred assessment tool in the future. Further research is required to determine the most appropriate tools to quantify early structural lung disease (gas trapping, bronchial wall thickening, bronchiectasis) and mucus plugging in early childhood, particularly assessing airway dimensions and air trapping, including formulation of appropriate reference ranges from corresponding normative data.…”

High-throughput phenotyping and genetic linkage of cortical bone microstructure in the mouse

“…Bone quality as defined through structure and organization of bone properties plays a more important role for these cases [ 13 ]. Existing studies have examined inheritance in bone microstructure [ 14 – 21 ], but do not use sufficient resolution to characterize the cellular structures inside cortical bone nor manage to disentangle growth hormone during the mapping of specific regions of the genome. To link the microstructure phenotypes to specific gene loci, we performed a large scale study of morphology and cortical micro-structure on a population of mice raised in a controlled environment with known genetic lineage, an intercross-experiment.…”