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Abstract

Many pulmonary diseases can be characterized by visual abnormalities on lung CT scans. Some diseases manifest similar defects but require completely di_erent treatments, as is the case for Pulmonary Hypertension (PH) and Pulmonary Embolism (PE): both present hypo- and hyper-perfused regions but with di_erent distribution across the lung and require di_erent treatment protocols. Finding these distributions by visual inspection is not trivial even for trained radiologists who currently use invasive catheterism to diagnose PH. A Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) tool that could facilitate the non-invasive diagnosis of these diseases can bene_t both the radiologists and the patients. Most of the visual di_erences in the parenchyma can be characterized using texture descriptors. Current CAD systems often use texture information but the texture is either computed in a patch-based fashion, or based on an anatomical division of the lung. The di_culty of precisely _nding these divisions in abnormal lungs calls for new tools for obtaining new meaningful divisions of the lungs. In this paper we present a method for unsupervised segmentation of lung CT scans into subregions that are similar in terms of texture and spatial proximity. To this extent, we combine a previously validated Riesz-wavelet texture descriptor with a well-known superpixel segmentation approach that we extend to 3D. We demonstrate the feasibility and accuracy of our approach on a simulated texture dataset, and show preliminary results for CT scans of the lung comparing subjects su_ering either from PH or PE. The resulting texture-based atlas of individual lungs can potentially help physicians in diagnosis or be used for studying common texture distributions related to other diseases.

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